Introduction
Good oral hygiene is essential for the prevention of caries and periodontal disease. There are various aids available for cleaning teeth. All of them have the aim to remove bacterial plaque. The toothbrush is the most important instrument besides the toothpaste. Here you will get an insight into everything you need to know.
Structure of a toothbrush
The toothbrush can be divided into 3 important distinguishing features:
- The handle
- The brush head and
- The bristles
At first sight the brush handle may not seem so important to you. However, a comparison of different toothbrushes shows that there are significant differences between the toothbrush handles. Above all, a toothbrush handle should lie firmly in the hand.
It should therefore be ergonomically shaped, i.e. it must allow for fatigue-free brushing. It should be possible to guide the toothbrush well and, if possible, there should be a support for the thumb. In order to meet these requirements, the handle must be long enough and not too narrow so that it lies firmly in the hand.
A rubber insert prevents it from turning. Toothbrushes with a bent handle are intended to imitate a dental instrument and thus also better grasp inaccessible areas. The brush head is the carrier of the bristles.
A brush head that is too long does not improve brushing performance; on the contrary, a short brush head makes it much easier to reach the teeth, since the teeth are not straight, but are arranged in an arc. With a short brush head the inner sides of the teeth are also reached better. This is not possible with a long head.
There are special children’s toothbrushes with extra small brush heads for the particularly narrow jaws of children. The brush head is provided with recesses in which the bristles are fixed. The end of the brush head should be rounded to avoid injuries.
In the past, toothbrushes were primarily used with natural bristles. Today, one has completely departed from this and uses only plastic bristles. Natural bristles have several disadvantages, they cannot be rounded, they have a medullary canal in which bacteria can settle, and they do not have a smooth surface, but are scaly, which favors the growth of bacteria.
Plastic bristles do not have all these disadvantages. They can be rounded, which prevents gum injuries, they have no medullary canal and their surface is smooth. They are attached to the brush head either with a small wire or by welding.
The latter prevents hiding places for bacteria. Plastic bristles are also very flexible, they adapt to the shape of the tooth and have a high resilience. Plastic bristles can be produced in various degrees of hardness.
They are available in the hardness grades hard, medium and soft. Depending on the individual needs, you can choose the right toothbrush. The bristle field of the toothbrush can be very different.
There are many different ways to design the bristle field. If the surface of the bristle field is even, it is called a multi-tuft toothbrush. Here the individual bristle tufts are vertical and parallel to each other.
The bristles can be rounded off very well in this arrangement. If the bristles stand diagonally against each other, it is a V-shaped toothbrush. It should be able to penetrate particularly well into the interdental spaces.
Due to their high flexibility, however, multi-air brushes can also do this. There are further variations of the multi-air toothbrushes. The outer bristles can be higher than the inner ones. In addition, the inner bristles are harder and the outer bristles softer. This configuration is intended to cause the harder bristles to remove plaque and the softer ones to massage the gums.
