Wear Index of Two Electric Toothbrush Heads Over 3 Months

Objectives: The aim of this randomized study was to evaluate wear progression of two electric brush heads after 4, 6, 8 and 13 weeks of use.

Methods:  This was a randomized, cross-over study among a general population using a 5-point scale index (Conforti et al., 2003) to score the wear index (WI) of two marketed brush heads a) Oral-B^® Precision Clean^® (PC, Procter & Gamble) and b) EASYFLEX^® Store Brand (SB, Ranir), both used on Oral-B^® oscillating-rotating toothbrushes. Subjects were balanced on age and gender and randomized to one of 4 cohorts (4, 6, 8 or 13 weeks product use) and to one of two treatment sequences. A Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test was used to analyze WI within each cohort and a Wilcoxon Rank Sum test was used to compare WI between cohorts.

Results:  267 subjects were enrolled, 243 evaluable brush heads pairs were retrieved. The mean WI for PC ranged from 1.47 (Week 4) to 1.75 (Week 13), WI for SB ranged from 1.92 to 2.07 respectively. For all time periods, PC had statistically significantly lower mean WI (p≤0.0005) than SB. No statistically significant difference in WI was found between PC at Week 13 (1.75) and SB at Week 4 (1.92, p=0.1137), but with a directional higher WI for SB of 0.17. An overall average of all 4 times periods showed that 37.9% of subjects had higher WI scores when using SB versus PC compared to only 4.1% of subjects with higher WI scores when using PC versus SB. 58% of subjects had an equal WI with either of both brush heads.

Conclusions: PC brush heads showed significantly less wear than SB brush head after 4, 6, 8 and 13 weeks of use. Based on results improved functionality can be expected for PC brush heads over a 3 month lifetime.