universidade de são paulo - Faculdade de Odontologia - Unesp

101
One other important observation is that, within each group, there was no
significant difference between absence and presence of saliva. This result is in
accordance with those obtained in previous investigations [29,31] which evaluated
the effect of saliva on C. glabrata adhesion. These findings suggest that the
salivary pellicle did not increase the Candida glabrata adhesion to polymer
surfaces, as has been found with Candida albicans [19,23]. Moreover, there are
only a few studies dealing with interactions between salivary pellicle and Candida
glabrata [29,31,32,42]. Hence, further studies are needed on this subject.
The surface roughness is an important factor that can affect the adhesion of
Candida to the material surfaces [32,43,44]. Thus, in this study, the specimens
were made between glass slides in order to obtain smooth and standardized
surfaces. As can be observed in Table 2, the results demonstrated that there were
no significant differences in the median roughness values among all groups
evaluated.
In conclusion, this in vitro study demonstrates that hydrophilic surfaces, as
those obtained with Ar/50W plasma treatment, have potential for reducing the
adhesion of Candida glabrata, which may be involved in the pathogenesis of
denture stomatitis and related infections. Additionally, the saliva pellicle did not
significantly increase Candida glabrata adhesion. However, as this study is
limited only to one strain and one heat-polymerized denture base, more
comprehensive investigations using other strains as well as different denture base
materials are required.