A Novel Basic Oral Rinse Assay for Monitoring of Disease Activity in Chronic Periodontitis Patients: A Case-control Study

Introduction: The migration of neutrophils into gingival crevice is the first line of defence against the subgingival plaque. Although neutrophils are mandatory for maintaining health of the periodontium, their excess also seems to be detrimental. Excess of neutrophils within the periodontal tissues leads to tissue destruction. Aim: To develop a simple, economical non-invasive oral rinse assay to assess oral inflammatory load and to find a correlation between Oral Inflammatory Load (OIL) and periodontal disease activity and severity. Materials and Methods: In this case control study fifty subjects were enrolled in two different groups: Chronic Periodontitis (CP) and Periodontally Healthy (PH). Pocket Probing Depth (PD), Clinical Attachment Loss (CAL) and Bleeding On Probing (BOP) were assessed on six sites per tooth. Saliva expectorate was collected, processed and stained with Methylene blue. Oral Neutrophil Count (ONC) was made under 40x magnification of a light microscope. Demographic and clinical characteristics of the two groups were compared using unpaired t-test while the statistical difference between the two rinses in the same subject was assessed via paired t-test. Spearman’s correlation coefficient was applied to assess the association between log transformed neutrophils and clinical parameters. Results: All the clinical parameters were significantly increased in CP Group compared to the PH group (p