Magical Bacteria and How to Spot Them
How Amardent Scores Your Microbiome
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This is it — the final entry in our How Scout Works series and the last piece of the puzzle in how we monitor and score your oral wellness so that you can stay at your peak.
In part 2 of the series, we discussed how microbes can influence short-term and long-term oral wellness. We also mentioned that they can set up large mats called biofilms, allowing them to adhere to teeth and disrupt your health. Detecting these microbes, particularly the ones that set up biofilms, is one of the most critical steps to gauging your wellness, and it’s something that Scout is purpose-built for.
Getting the Bugs to Glow
Your microbiome is full of hard-to-spot organisms. Most members of this crew like to hide out in cracks, crevices, or difficult-to-brush regions of the mouth. On top of that, they’re so small that they can’t easily be seen, and unlike in cartoons, they don’t come with cosmic-green coloring… or do they.
Well, certainly not under normal conditions. However, luckily for us, Scout can exploit a property known as autofluorescence. Autofluorescence is the natural emission of light when a structure is excited by light. Translated to English, it’s when shining one color of light on an organism causes it to emit another color of light.
The major players in the oral microbiome, specifically those of the damaging variety, all autofluoresce. And not only do they autofluoresce, but they do so with different colors depending on the microbe. This lets our camera not just detect the presence of bacteria but actually sniff out what families are present where.
Grading the Gums
Scout’s ability to detect bacteria gives us the ability to move beyond scoring just the hard tissue. Gingival inflation, a precursor to gingivitis and its nasty older brother periodontitis, has a common root in bacteria. Colonization by harmful bacteria can, in many cases, irritate the gums, making it easier for more bacteria to make a home in the gums.
Gum wellness is just as critical to oral health as mineralization. In order to help you maintain it, Scout uses it’s bacteria-finding technology to assess not just the degree of redness in your gums, but the distribution of bacteria across them. The bacteria responsible for gingival problems autofluoresce the same way as the ones responsible for dental problems. That means that Scout can keep an eye on your whole mouth, not just your teeth.
The Full Picture
Congratulations! With that, you have the full picture of how Scout works, and a great intro to how Amardent thinks about helping you maintain your oral health.
We’re excited to branch out into more topics with our weekly newsletters, and we’re looking forward to breaking down dentistry into some bite-sized concepts.
As always, sign up here to get this newsletter straight to your inbox, and go check out Amardent’s Scout: The world’s most advanced at-home dentistry device.
