How sports dentistry is shaping a micro-invasive approach to care

Ahead of Dentistry Live: Sports dentistry powered by Curodont, Dr Mide Ojo explains why treating athletes has changed the way he approaches patient assessment, and how those lessons are helping shape a micro-invasive approach to everyday care.

From the playing field to the practice

Working with high-performance athletes has taught me that sports dentistry is rarely just about managing traumatic injuries. Despite being among the fittest people in the world, almost half of elite athletes (49%) have dental caries, highlighting the significant impact that training, diet and sports nutrition can have on oral health (Avgerinos et al, 2025).

Athletes may represent a high-risk group, but many of the factors affecting their oral health are also familiar in everyday practice, making the lessons we learn from these patients relevant to us all.

Athletes often rely on high-carbohydrate diets, sports drinks and supplements to support performance. These behaviours are not confined to elite sport, with many of our patients embracing similar products and dietary approaches as part of an active lifestyle or in pursuit of wider health and fitness goals.

While these choices may be perceived as supporting overall wellbeing, frequent exposure to carbohydrates can create an oral environment that increases caries risk and makes enamel lesions more likely to develop.

For athletes and others adopting a similar lifestyle, these factors can result in subtle changes that challenge us as clinicians, making them an ideal group through which to understand how earlier recognition of caries can influence treatment decisions.

It is this process of recognising what we are seeing, assessing the individual patient and deciding how best to respond that I will explore through a live patient demonstration during Dentistry Live: Sports dentistry: powered by Curodont, showing how that clinical decision-making translates into everyday practice.

Making every assessment count

Recognising these changes earlier gives us more options. Assessment becomes about understanding which management approach is most appropriate and identifying opportunities to preserve natural tooth structure.

Early carious lesions can be easy to overlook. They may be non-cavitated, with an apparently intact surface, and their presentation can vary depending on their location. Recognising these early changes and understanding their significance is therefore an important part of assessment.

The next challenge is deciding how best to manage what we find. When the tooth surface remains intact, we have an opportunity to consider approaches that manage the lesion while preserving healthy tooth structure. That requires us to think carefully about the stage of disease, the individual patient and the options available.

That is why I have become increasingly interested in micro-invasive dentistry. For me, it represents a different way of thinking about patient care and continues to shape the way I approach treatment planning every day.

It is an approach that aligns closely with the wider vVARDIS philosophy: identifying opportunities to intervene earlier, using biomimetic science to enable the natural tooth repair process and preserving healthy tooth structure wherever possible.

Curodont Repair is the best example of how that philosophy can translate into clinical practice. Using biomimetic peptide technology, it enables the treatment of non-cavitated, early carious lesions, giving us an evidence-based option to inform treatment decisions that reflect the stage of disease and the patient’s needs.

When patients understand what we have found, why it matters and how we can respond, they become far more engaged in their care, making treatment planning a discussion rather than a decision made for them.

Those conversations also reinforce the important role of the wider dental team. From recognising early changes and educating patients to supporting ongoing care, everyone has an important contribution to make.

Bringing that thinking to life

That thinking sits at the heart of my upcoming Dentistry Live: Sports dentistry: powered by Curodont session.

By working with a real patient, I want to show how assessment, diagnosis and treatment planning come together in everyday practice. Participants will see how I build a treatment plan, integrating a micro-invasive approach where appropriate.

Whether you regularly treat athletes or want to expand the options available to all your patients, I hope the session gives you new ways to think about familiar clinical challenges and how you might approach them in practice.

The lessons I have learned through sports dentistry continue to shape the way I practise every day. I look forward to sharing those experiences and demonstrating how I apply them in practice, so that you leave the session with practical insights into assessment, treatment planning and micro-invasive care that you can take back to your own patients. I hope you will join me.

Reference

• Avgerinos S et al. (2025) Achieving oral and planetary health; how sports dental medicine can pioneer and realise transformation in oral healthcare. Front. Oral Health; **6:**1664261. doi: 10.3389/froh.2025.1664261.

This article is sponsored by vVARDIS.