Objective: Nonsurgical treatment has been shown to be effective in dealing with inflammatory lesions around implant without bone loss. However, when bone loss is noticed, surgical treatment may be needed. Nonetheless, before the surgical approaches can be effective, the contaminated implant surface has to be detoxified. Many detoxifying agents/techniques have been proposed and have shown varieties of outcomes, these include but not limited to: citric acid, chlorhexidine, local and systemic antibiotics, hydrogen peroxide, air-powder abrasive, laser and photodynamic therapy, and implantoplasty using burs. Hence, the aim of this review was to evaluate them in terms of their ability in achieving implant surface detoxification.
Materials and methods: A search of PubMed and a hand search of articles were conducted up to December 2011. Different keywords related to the treatment of peri-implant diseases were used.
Results: At this time, all techniques/agents have shown to be equally effective to detoxify the contaminated implant surface.
Conclusion: Comparative studies of different detoxification methods are heterogeneous, leaving a few voids when selecting a specific technique for detoxifying the contaminated implant surface.