UCLA

Introduction:

Dental caries is one of the most common chronic diseases in the world. In daily dental practice, dentists are treating many cases where the destruction from caries involves enamel and dentin and reaches the pulp. One of the main objectives of a restorative dental procedure is the protection of the pulp to maintain its vitality, and pulp capping has been shown to be very successful in this regard for cases of reversible pulpitis. When the carious lesion is in close proximity to the pulp but the pulp tissue has not been exposed, indirect pulp capping is performed using any of several liner or base materials prior to placing the final restoration. On the other hand, if there is a direct exposure to the pulp, treatment with direct pulp capping requires careful and specific selection of the pulp capping material.

In the past decade, there has been a debate on the best available material to be used in direct pulp capping. Calcium hydroxide was considered the gold standard material used for direct pulp capping for decades prior to the introduction of Mineral Trioxide Aggregate (MTA). Many studies have been conducted to study the effectiveness of these materials when used in direct pulp capping. The purpose of this study is to identify the best available evidence on direct pulp capping material and determine if MTA is more effective than calcium hydroxide.

Methods:

The research strategy included search engines and hand searching to obtain randomized clinical trials and systematic reviews relevant to the research question. The search engines used were PubMed, ADA Evidence Base Database, Cochrane library and Web of science. Two readers were involved in validating the quality of the evidence and strength of recommendation in randomized clinical trials using Ex-GRADE and the revised risk of bias instruments. Acceptable sampling will be completed prior to performing Meta-analysis. Similarly, (R-AMSTAR) instrument was used to quantify the quality of systematic reviews.

Results:

The bibliome consists of seven clinical trials, five observational studies and four systematic reviews. The acceptable sampling analysis produced three systematic reviews, two clinical trials and four observational studies. Qualitative assessment of the accepted studies confirmed that MTA is more effective and shows better clinical outcomes in direct pulp capping procedure when compared to calcium hydroxide.

Conclusion:

This review confirms that direct pulp capping is an effective conservative approach to maintain the vitality of dental pulp tissue. Qualitative consensus of the research confirmed that MTA showed a higher success rate, reduced pulpal inflammation, and had a more reparative dentin formation when used for direct pulp capping. Calcium hydroxide showed more failures compared to MTA, and the superiority of MTA was confirmed in short and long periods of follow up.

Key words: Pulp capping, dental Pulp Capping, direct pulp capping, evidence-based dentistry, Calcium Hydroxide, Dycal, Ca(OH)2, Mineral Trioxide Aggregate, MTA, GMTA, WMTA and ProRoot MTA.