Family: Household chemicals & care
Manual toothbrush
Removes less plaque by meta-analysis; in an abrasion experiment it removes a third as much dentin.
Overview
The manual brush is the reference point in these trials: the 11% and 21% figures for the powered brush are calculated against it. In the machine abrasion experiment the ordering reverses: at equal force and with the same paste, a flat-trim manual brush removed 6.13 micrometres of dentin against 15.71 and 21.03 for the powered ones over a simulated eight and a half years. That experiment runs on samples from extracted teeth in a machine, not in people mouths, and cannot be carried straight across to a brushing habit.
Quality indicators
- State of the evidence
The same limits: the brush was studied as the comparator
More detail
All the caveats of the review apply to the manual brush too: in these trials it is the comparator. The abrasion experiment, where it looks gentler, is a machine simulation on samples — it answers a different question from the trials in people.
Health-related indicators
- What the research shows
Serves as the reference against which those percentages are calculated
More detail
In the trials the manual brush is the comparator, not the measured side: the 11% and 21% express the difference relative to it. These works give no figure of its own for plaque removal by the manual brush.
- The known trade-off
In the same experiment it removes the least — 6.13 µm
More detail
The flat-trim manual brush produced the smallest surface loss of the four tested: 6.13 µm against 15.71 and 21.03 for the powered ones. So the ordering on plaque removal is one way and the ordering on dentin abrasion the other, and the platform shows both without collapsing them into a verdict.
What is nearby
Sources and evidence
Sources by kind of evidence
REVIEWSystematic review2
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