Current views on treatment of halitosis: foreign practice

Traditional halitosis treatment involves reducing microbial contamination through chemical and/or mechanical action; however, these methods are ineffective in the long-term.

According to recent systematic reviews, there is no scientific evidence of the effectiveness of halitosis treatments, and even when reports indicate a positive effect, it is temporary. To increase the number of studies being compared, analysis of the results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) should be performed considering already published data. Therefore, a review of recent RCTs is required for conducting and planning further scientific research on halitosis treatment.

Purpose of the investigation — to study the effectiveness of oral halitosis treatment based on materials from foreign publications from 2019 to 2023.

This article provides a descriptive review of foreign scientific publications on modern methods of treating oral halitosis. A search for full-text articles was conducted in the electronic databases PubMed and Google Scholar for 2019–2023. The most relevant articles that met the selection criteria were selected and included in this review: 31 publications on oral halitosis treatment: 3 Cochrane reviews of RCTs; 14 literature reviews, including meta-analyses; 12 RCTs and clinical studies; and 2 experimental studies.

In foreign studies, the use of probiotics and photodynamic therapy and their combination with standard treatment methods are most widely presented; RCTs have established their effectiveness, especially when used together with traditional methods of mechanical tongue cleaning. To prevent halitosis, it appears relevant to use materials with antibacterial properties in prosthetics, particularly the modification of polymethyl methacrylate with silver and graphene nanoparticles.

However, against the backdrop of positive results obtained in individual reviews, the conclusions of systematic reviews are contradictory. There is no evidence of the long-term effectiveness of the proposed treatment methods, and there is a weak evidence base for studies, which makes it challenging to use them in the practical work of dentists. In this regard, new RCTs with a longer observation period and considering published data are required.