Pulp Vitality Testers
4 products
About pulp vitality testers
A pulp vitality tester of the electric kind delivers a current that stimulates and depolarizes the A-delta nerve fibres within the pulp of a tooth. A cold test works through the hydrodynamic theory instead: thermal contraction moves dentinal fluid, which excites the same fibres through intact odontoblasts. Both read the sensory response of nerve tissue rather than the blood supply, so they can give false-positive and false-negative results in trauma, calcified canals, immature teeth or recently restored teeth.
Reads whether the nerve in the pulp responds, not how long the canal is. A scoping review of pulpotomy studies found markedly higher positive response rates with electric pulp testing than with cold testing.
Sources: Pulp sensibility assessment following permanent tooth pulpotomy: a scoping review (Front Dent Med, PMC13639861) · Diagnostic accuracy of individual and multimodal pulp sensibility tests (Cureus, PMC13539165) · FDA 21 CFR 872.1720, Pulp tester