Clinical Effectiveness of laser Therapy as an adjunct to non-surgical periodontal treatment in subjects with Chronic Periodontitis: A randomized clinical study

Background: Periodontitis is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects the supporting structures of teeth, resulting in tooth loss. Nonsurgical and surgical therapies along with local and systemic antibiotic regimens have been advocated in the treatment of periodontitis.   Aim: The aim of this split-mouth, double-blind, controlled clinical study is to evaluate and compare the effect of scaling and root planing alone and a combination of scaling and root planing (SRP) with diode laser therapy in patients with chronic periodontitis.

Settings and Design: 30 patients with chronic periodontitis were taken from the department of periodontology and implantology, Dental College, RIMS.

Materials and Methods: It is a split-mouth study and subjects will be divided into Group I – the test group (SRP + diode laser) and Group II – the control group (SRP alone). A low-level diode laser with a wavelength of 810 nm, power output 0.4 W, and energy density of 2 J/cm2 & 4 J/cm2 was applied to the gingival pocket. The following clinical parameters were assessed: oral hygiene index simplified; clinical attachment level (CAL); probing pocket depth (PPD); bleeding on probing (BOP) at baseline,  1 month, and 3 months after the treatment.

Result: The data will be analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21. All the variables are continuous variables which will be summarized as mean and standard deviation. A paired t-test will be used for comparison of the mean value of 2 related samples or groups. Repeated measures of ANOVA test will be used to compare more than two related means. The level of statistical significance was set at 0.05.

Keywords: Chronic Periodontitis, Gingival inflammation, Scaling and root planning, Low-level laser therapy, Non-surgical periodontal treatment.