General Membership Meeting: Vital Pulp Therapy for Permanent Teeth: Current Guidelines for Clinical Practice – 12/8/22

ONLINE VIA ZOOM ONLY – NO IN-PERSON EVENT THIS MONTH

When dealing with inflamed pulps, endodontics offers treatment modalities beyond root canal treatment. Indeed, preservation of pulpal vitality has become a predictable treatment option, even in symptomatic cases. This is probably due to a better understanding of the caries process, its microbiology, and its inflammatory mechanisms. Recent guidelines described procedures for the diagnosis of pulpal conditions and outlined procedures for the management of exposed pulp tissue. The presentation will review the evidence supporting this paradigm shift and detail the clinical approach, including radiographic evaluation, case selection, sensibility testing, and hemorrhage control. The advantages of various bioactive materials (i.e., calcium silicate cements) will be assessed; it has been shown that their use leads to predictable hard tissue repair indirect, partial, and full pulpotomy procedures.
Conceivably, the best root canal treatment is the one that is not needed. There are more reasons to maintain pulp viability. To this end, vital pulp therapy will be compared to the current status in pulp regeneration, another treatment option that could be viewed as minimally invasive.

In conclusion, participants will be able to
– Describe current guidelines for vital pulp therapy
– Selected appropriate materials and techniques for pulpotomies and direct pulp caps
– Appreciate the evidence supporting clinical procedures

Biography:

Dr. Ove A. Peters joined the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, in 2020 after faculty positions in Heidelberg, Germany and Zurich, Switzerland, as well as at the University of California, San Francisco. Most recently, he was the founding director of the postgraduate endodontic program at the Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry in San Francisco, a professor with tenure and the Chair of the Department of Endodontics at that school.

Dr. Peters has wide-ranging clinical and research expertise and has published more than 160 manuscripts related to endodontic technology and biology. He has authored two books and contributed to several leading textbooks in dentistry; he also is an associate editor for the International Endodontic Journal, an academic editor for PLOS One, and serves on the review panel of multiple other journals. Dr. Peters has received the Hans Genet Award of the European Society of Endodontology as well as the Louis I. Grossman Award of the American Association of Endodontists. He is a member of OKU and a Fellow of the International and American Colleges of Dentistry.