Objective:

Determine the effect of two different types of tooth whitening on dental esthetics self-perception.

Methods:

A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted of 48 patients treated with two whitening systems. The Spanish version of the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-e) was used to measure esthetic self-perception before the whitening treatment. The patients were assigned to one of two treatment groups: ambulatory whitening group and clinical whitening group. The OHIP-e survey was applied again one week after completion of the intervention. The scores obtained by both groups were analyzed with the oral esthetics self-perception scale before and after the intervention. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test was applied to determine the normality of mean OHIP-e scores. Student's t test was used to evaluate the change in dental esthetics self-perception before and after whitening. The statistical analyses performed accepted a type I error probability of 0.05 (p< 0.05).

Results:

OHIP-e scores were initially different in the two groups and improved in both (decreased non-significantly with the application of the whitening treatments, p< 0.05), except for the physical pain dimension in the clinical group (p= 0.03).

Conclusions:

Ambulatory and clinical tooth whitening bring about a similar change in dental esthetics self-perception a week after completion of the treatment. Both treatments had a positive impact on the patients' dental esthetics self-perception.

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