8 Uses of Sodium Fluoride Varnish in Dental Practice

Are you a sweet tooth person? Like there’s always a room for dessert in your tummy since we all know chocolate lava cake is still tempting. Oh, just imagine those warm, brown, melting chocolate dissolve in your mouth. You definitely can’t say no to them. But your teeth will always do, trust me. High sugar level contained in a dessert or sweet is one of the main cause of tooth cavities.

How can sugar cause cavities? Cavities itself is a situation when specific types of bacteria produce acid that destroy the hard tissue of the teeth ( enamel, dentin, and cementum). Moreover, sugars in food are these bacteria’s main energy source.

Caries Prevention

In order to prevent caries, we can do fluoride therapy. Fluoride therapy is the use of fluoride for medical purpose. Usually we’re told to brush our teeth often, isn’t it? Maybe some of us were wondering all this time, how is it related to prevent caries. The thing is, besides trying to do a low sugar diet, brushing our teeth often really works. One of the reason why is because when we are brushing our teeth we are definitely going to use toothpaste, which has Sodium Fluoride ( NaF ) in it.

Sodium Fluoride is a medication to prevent tooth cavities, make teeth stronger, and prevent breakage from acid and bacteria, but its main goal is to bring back the mineral in teeth that loss because of acid and bacteria. Sodium fluoride is a chemical compounds that we often hear or see because it’s a common ingredient in toothpaste. It can be in liquid, pill, drops or paste form.

So, here are some uses of sodium fluoride varnish in dental practice:

1. Protect our teeth

It is important for us to keep our teeth protected from bacteria, when bacteria piling up in between teeth, it can cause plague in your teeth which will make our teeth dirty and unhealthy. Keeping our teeth healthy will prevent us from disease and infection. By then, you want to know about the Harmful Chemicals in Toothpaste

2. Prevent cavities

Fluoride will protect our teeth so it won’t lose minerals easily. If teeth loses its minerals it can leads to cavities and create hole in our teeth. When this occurs, it can cause a bad toothache, because food and drink that we consume are piling up in the hole.

3. Increased teeth enamel

If teeth enamel getting thinner, bacteria will easily produce more acid in our mouth. When the amount of acid getting bigger, tooth decay will occur faster and easier. So, increased teeth enamel actually means preventing tooth decay. Indeed, that’s the uses of sodium fluoride varnish in dental practice.

Delivery of Sodium Fluoride Varnish

Besides medication usage in Branches of Pharmacy sodium fluoride also can be delivered into something different, and changed into something useful and less harm such as, water fluoridation, mouth rinse, foams, toothpaste supplement, and much more.

1. Water Fluoridation

For some country with less fluoride, they will add sodium fluoride in public water supply. So, that it will reduces tooth decay that happening in the city.

2. Mouth rinse

Mouth rinse can be professionally applied or apply it yourself at home, because it’s application are very easy so mostly people will apply it by themselves. Rinsing is recommended for daily use, but it’s not recommended for children under 6 years old child, as they will swallow it and endangered their bodies because of too much sodium fluoride. (Also red Harmful Chemicals in the Environment)

3. Foams

Foams usually used to fix the teeth that have experienced fluorosis, or teeth cavities. It brings back the natural teeth color, or we can called it as color restorations.

4. Toothpaste

Toothpaste mainly contain of sodium fluoride. That’s why that when we are brushing our teeth, we aren’t allowed to swallow it, because it was pretty dangerous for our body.

5. Medical Supplement

Studies have proven that sodium fluoride is one of the most safe and effective way to dense the bone density, but sodium fluoride can’t work effectively with osteoporosis. It doesn’t appear to decrease osteoporosis nor decrease the risk of fracture.

Precautions of Sodium Fluoride

In dental treatment, sodium fluoride is often suggested by dentist with prescription, although there are lots of controversy happening around, because of some effect that caused by overdose of sodium fluoride such as, osteoporosis, joint problems, even decrease the dose of testosterone or progesterone.

That’s why in spite of its benefit, this medication isn’t recommended for baby under 6 months old, because as what we have known before, it is pretty dangerous. So, in fact our life needs sodium fluoride to take care of our teeth, but if we are using it too much, overdose will be exactly the consequences such as, early puberty, fluorosis, brain problem, etc. Below, we are going to discuss it one by one.

1. Early puberty

Studies have proven, that kids who consume or drink water that have a high doses of fluoride can leads to early puberty. It happens because fluoride affect the thyroid glands that has the role in human reproduction. Usually kids who has too much fluoride in their body will have puberty 5 months earlier than the normal kids.

2. Fluorosis

Fluorosis is a widely common disorder, it caused by overdose to sodium fluoride(with concentrations above 1000ppm) in the first 8 years of life, because at this time permanent teeth are formed. Signs  of overdose to sodium fluoride can be seen when there are brown, grey or black spot in our teeth, if it’s in normal dose it’s supposed to have white color.

3. Brain Dysfunction

Fluoride also can affects our brain function, so brain nerves also will be interrupted too. Even in some cases too much fluoride can leads to Alzheimer with higher percentage than normal people would do.

It’s not only our teeth that we have to keep. We as a human being we have to keep our entire body, healthy and clean. So, don’t forget to brush your teeth, flossing it regularly, and keep it clean. Let’s keep our body healthy and you can read List of Chemicals Used in A Medical Office, because a healthy body, leads to happy mind.