Objectives: To review the literature on non-surgical treatment of peri-implant mucositis and peri-implantitis.
Material and methods: A search of PubMed and The Cochrane Library of the Cochrane Collaboration (CENTRAL) as well as a hand search of articles were conducted. Publications and articles accepted for publication up to November 2007 were included.
Results: Out of 437 studies retrieved a total of 24 studies were selected for the review. Thus the available evidence for non-surgical treatment of peri-implant mucositis and peri-implantitis is scarce.
Conclusions: It was observed that mechanical non-surgical therapy could be effective in the treatment of peri-implant mucositis lesions. Furthermore, the adjunctive use of antimicrobial mouth rinses enhanced the outcome of mechanical therapy of such mucositis lesions. In peri-implantitis lesions non-surgical therapy was not found to be effective. Adjunctive chlorhexidine application had only limited effects on clinical and microbiological parameters. However, adjunctive local or systemic antibiotics were shown to reduce bleeding on probing and probing depths. Minor beneficial effects of laser therapy on peri-implantitis have been shown; this approach needs to be further evaluated. There is a need for randomized-controlled studies evaluating treatment models of non-surgical therapy of peri-implant mucositis and peri-implantitis.