Evaluation of the response of gingival tissues to the use of mouthwash with chlorhexidine and chlorhexidine + hyaluronic acid in terms of healing of the surgical wound following third molar surgery.

Wound healing following third molar surgery will be evaluated at the level of the flap incision. Surgical interventions will be performed following a standardized protocol by a single operator.

After surgery, patients will be randomly assigned to study groups corresponding to mouth rinse prescription. The mouth rinse will be assigned by an experimenter not involved in the following steps of the study, in order to maintain the examiner blind. The patient will receive a non-labelled mouth rinse to avoid biases both of the examiner and the patient. The patient will also be given a diary for the registration of the number of rinses per day, to be returned to the examiner at T14. The mouth rinse protocol assigned to each study participant includes a 10 ml-rinse for 60 seconds twice-a-day (every 12 hours) for 14 days.

The patients will be allocated in one of the three distinct study groups as it follows:

Group A: administration of 0.2% chlorhexidine + anti-discoloration system + hyaluronic acid mouth rinse (test group 1) Group B: administration of 0.2% chlorhexidine + anti-discoloration system mouth rinse (test group 2).

Group C: administration of placebo mouth rinse (control group)

Post-treatment photographs of surgical incision will be taken immediately after surgery and at 3 (T3), 7 (T7), and 14 (T14) days post-op, in order to allow the evaluation of the degree of wound healing. The degree of surgical healing will be evaluated using the Wound Healing Index - WHI (Wachtel classification) on all the incisions, and a score from 1 to 5 will be assigned.

At T3, T7, and T14 the following clinical parameters will be recorded for each patient: oedema, trismus and pain level. The clinical examinations will be performed by calibrated examiner blind to group allocation.

Inclusion Criteria:

• males or females of age range between 18 and 70 years,
• good health status,
• indication to perform third molar surgery,
• patients willing to give informed consent,
• compliance to the study follow-up,

Exclusion Criteria:

• pregnancy or breast-feeding,
• indication to antibiotic therapy prior to surgical treatment,
• chronic infections,
• systemic diseases (including cardiovascular, pulmonary, cerebral, and metabolic diseases),
• previous therapy with the mouth rinses employed in the present study, and
• smoking habit (>20 cigarettes per day, and/or pipe or cigar smoking).