Perio Insight puts spotlight on EFP guideline on periodontal treatment

The summer issue of the EFP magazine Perio Insightis dedicated to the federation’s recently published clinical practice guideline on periodontal treatment.

It features interviews with two of the guideline’s lead authors – Mariano Sanz and Iain Chapple – and a selection of some of its key recommendations for clinicians.

"This guideline will ultimately benefit the patient, who would receive the best possible treatment under its provisions,” says Mariano Sanz, chair of Perio Workshop 2019,  at which 90 experts from 19 countries started to draw up the guideline by evaluating 15 systematic reviews on different forms of periodontal therapy.

He explains that the guideline’s importance “lies in the fact that it has updated the scientific evidence of the efficacy of all the preventive and therapeutic procedures that are used today in periodontal therapy and has created recommendations – based on this evidence – to guide the treatment of periodontitis depending on its degree of severity (stages I, II, and III).”

In his interview, Iain Chapple discusses the recommendations relating to controversial topics, such as the use of systemic antibiotics and lasers.

In the case of antibiotics, says Prof Chapple, “the recommendation in the guideline is against using systemic antibiotics. But the reason for that was not the evidence, it was antimicrobial stewardship.”

As for lasers, it was not possible to make a recommendation in their favour “because of the heterogeneity of the way the studies had been done – we needed more evidence.”

The Treatment of Stage I-III Periodontitis – The EFP S3-level Clinical Practice Guidelineprovides oral-healthcare professionals with precise therapeutic pathways based on individual patient diagnoses and makes recommendations on specific interventions to treat periodontitis. The guideline, along with the systematic reviews, has been published in an open-access supplement of the EFP’s Journal of Clinical Periodontology.

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