Abstract

Purpose: To assess the effect of silver diamine fluoride (SDF) on microbial profiles present in plaque from root/cervical carious lesions, and its association with caries lesion arrest. Materials and Methods: Twenty patients with at least one soft cavitated root/cervical carious lesion were included. One lesion/patient was randomly selected and treated with 38% SDF. Supragingival plaque samples were harvested at preintervention and 1 month postintervention. Using an MiSeq platform, 16S rDNA sequencing of the V3-V4 regions was used to determine bacterial profiles. Clinical evaluation of lesion hardness was used to evaluate arrest. t tests, principal component analysis (PCA), multidimensional scaling (MDS), and generalized linear models (GLMs) tests were used for statistical comparisons. Results: From a total of 40 plaque samples, 468 probe targets were observed. Although 60% of lesions became hard postintervention, PCA and MDS tests showed no distinct pre- and postintervention groups. In addition, pre- and postintervention differences in diversity (Shannon index) of microbial profiles between patients with and without lesion arrest were not statistically different. A likelihood ratio test for pre- versus postintervention differences within patients, i.e., adjusting for differences between patients using negative binomial GLMs, showed 17 bacterial taxa with significant differences (FDR 0.05). Conclusion: Although 60% of lesions hardened after SDF treatment, this was not directly due to either overall statistically significant differences in microbial profiles or differences in microbial diversity. Nevertheless, there was a trend with some acid-producing species in that their relative abundance was reduced postintervention. The negative binomial GLMs showed 17 bacterial taxa that were significantly different after SDF treatment.