Notes on Newer Adhesive Developments in Dental

Newer Adhesive Developments in Dental

In the last decade, most new developments in dental adhesives have been focused on simplifying the components required for the bonding systems and improving performance of the resulting self-etching adhesives.

The true one-bottle self-etch systems have now evolved to only one material. This is applied to the tooth with no mixing required.

Some of the newer systems have modified the self-etch ingredients so as to result in improvements in the product’s shelf lives, with diminished hydrolysis in the package.

The quality of dentin adhesion with these self-etch systems is comparable to the etch-and-rinse adhesives, the enamel bonding of these systems still falls short of values for bond strengths achieved in the laboratory using a phosphoric acid etch system.

The self-etch systems remain popular due to the lack of concern regarding the technique used with moist dentin.

The moist bonding technique has been repeatedly shown to augment bond strengths of ethanol- and acetone-based etch-and-rinse adhesives, while low bond strengths have been associated with excessively air-dried dentin in the etch- and-rinse materials.

The major reason for this is presumed to be the effect of collapsing the collagen network at the bonding interface.

The collapsed collagen prevents complete infiltration of the resin monomers into the dematerialized dentin, leading to gaps and voids within the adhesive interface.