The Success of Endodontic Therapy — Healing and Functionality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current, relevant knowledge on the outcome of endodontic therapy is key to clinical decision making, particularly when endodontic treatment is weighed against tooth extraction and replacement. Inherent to reviewing the outcome is a definition of "success" in relation to the goals of therapy. As the specific goal set out by the individual patient may either be healing/prevention of disease (apical periodontitis) or just functional retention of the tooth, the potential for both healing and functionality is reviewed. Based on selected follow-up studies that offer the best evidence, the chance of teeth without apical periodontitis to remain free of disease after initial treatment or orthograde retreatment is 92 percent to 98 percent. The chance of teeth with apical periodontitis to completely heal after initial treatment or retreatment is 74 percent to 86 percent, and their chance to be functional over time is 91 percent to 97 percent. Thus there does not appear to be a systematic difference in outcome between initial treatment and orthograde retreatment. The outcome of apical surgery is less consistent than that of the nonsurgical treatment. The chance of teeth with apical periodontitis to completely heal after apical surgery is 37 percent to 85 percent, with a weighted average of approximately 70 percent. However, even with the lower chance of complete healing, the chance for the teeth to be functional over time is 86 percent to 92 percent. Considering the favorable outcome, conservative endodontic therapy, both nonsurgical and surgical, is definitely justified and should be attempted when a good restorative and periodontal prognosis is projected, unless the patient is not motivated to retain the tooth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".