Nowadays, the social concern is being concentrated on halitosis and many apparatuses for the halitosis control have been developed and used.
The tongue plaque plays very important role in malodor, therefore, many people use various tongue scrapers and toothbrushes to remove the tongue plaque by scraping its surface.
However the tongue scrapers are not popular because they are not so efficient in the clearing all regions of the tongue and cause some pains.
And in the case of toothbrushes, peoples feel nausea for the toothbrushes give the strong stimuli to the root of the tongue.
So it is necessary to develop the apparatus that is convenient and efficient in the removing the tongue plaque with no nausea.
General Dentistry Department, Dental Faculty, Pyongyang Medical College of
We designed the rational form of the tongue brush by the quality engineering techniques.
We set the three factors (A; the length of the seta, B; the thickness of the seta. C; the numbers of the seta rows) and planned the experiments, we evaluated the rate of removing of tongue plaque, nausea reflex and the lingual pain.
Then we chose the significant factors by analyzing the variance of the measuring values and determined the optimal condition.
In our study, the rational form of the tongue brush is as follows; the length of the seta is 5mm, the thickness of the seta is 0.17mm and the number of the seta rows is 1.5.
The width of brush is greater than 30mm and the total length of the tongue brush is greater than 150mm since the width of the tongue is 35.3~44.8mm and the length of the tongue is 41.3~60.9mm in Korean adults.
We evaluated the rate of the adhesion of the tongue plaque by comparing the changes between the before and after clearing the tongue 8 times with the tongue brush, tongue scraper, toothbrush.
The effect of the tongue brush in decreasing the malodor was evaluated by the discoloration experiment of lead acetate paper and the rate of inhibiting the sensual malodor.
The rate of removing of the tongue plaque is 82.0% in the tongue brush, 77.9% in the tongue scraper and 46.1% in the toothbrush. The tongue brush and tongue scraper are very effective in the remove of the tongue plaque and there is no significant difference between them (p>0.05).
The decreasing rate of malodor is 79.0% in the tongue brush, 74.9% in the tongue scraper and 50.0% in the toothbrush. The tongue brush and tongue scraper decreased the malodor significantly than the toothbrush (p>0.05)
During the use of the tongue brush, the effect in decreasing the malodor appeared after 2days but after 4day in the toothbrush group.
The tongue brush has a high removing rate of the tongue plaque and inhibiting rate of malodor.
We are going to continue our study to develop the tongue cleaning apparatus which is efficient, convenient and popular.
