The Effectiveness of Dental Bleaching during Orthodontic Treatment with Clear Aligners: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The objective of this article was to systematically review the literature to determine how effective tooth whitening procedures are when carried out in tandem with orthodontic clear aligners. This systematic review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). Online searches of PubMed, Medline via Ovid, Science Direct, the Cochrane database of systematic reviews via Ovid, Scopus, and Google Scholar as well as manual searches of the references of the selected articles were conducted. Clinical studies which assessed the efficacy of dental bleaching using orthodontic clear aligners were included in the present study. Data from the included studies were extracted and assessed for risk of bias using the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Three studies met the inclusion and exclusion criteria and were included in this study. One study compared the efficiency of tooth bleaching between clear aligners and conventional bleaching trays. One study evaluated the effectiveness of dental bleaching using clear aligners by comparing the tooth shade of those patients to a control group of patients who did not receive dental bleaching during orthodontic clear aligner treatment. One study evaluated the effectiveness of different concentrations of different bleaching agents using clear aligners. All the included studies showed an improved tooth shade when using clear aligners as bleaching trays.