Access-to-care crisis hits home; do self-etch adhesives measure up?

Dear DrBicuspid Member,

The first oral health assessment to be conducted on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in over a decade paints a bleak picture of rampant caries, periodontal disease, and other serious dental problems.

Some 90% of participants showed signs of active caries -- three times the rate typically found in the U.S., according to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which funded the study, presented today at the National Congress of American Indians annual conference. Click here to read the challenges the Lakota people face in obtaining adequate dental care and what solutions are being proposed.

In a related feature, DrBicuspid.com talked with Maxine Brings Him Back-Janis, RDH, MPH, a Lakota native who grew up on the reservation and was one of the researchers involved in the oral health study. The experience affected her so deeply she is now on a mission to find new ways to improve access to care for her family and friends who still live there.

Over in the Imaging & CAD/CAM Community, another software company is bringing cloud-based image and data sharing to dentistry. Brightsquid, a Canadian start-up, launched its dental service this year to enable dentists, specialists, and labs to view, annotate, and comment on a patient's treatment as it progresses -- all via a secure Web portal. Read more.

And in Restoratives Community news, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania compared four adhesive systems to determine whether self-etch adhesives measure up in terms of bond strength. Click here to find out which adhesive came out on top in this Journal of Esthetic and Restorative Dentistry study.