Welcome to the new world of dental materials, where Nanotechnology (the science of manipulating materials at the atomic level) will forever alter the durability of those attractive, white bonded fillings your dentist gave you. Ordinarily, those old, dingy-looking amalgam mercury fillings you may have in your mouth will still actually last longer than the newer tooth-colored bonded fillings. That’s because the nice-looking white fillings contain an adhesive layer that attaches the bonded material to the tooth structure, and this layer is now being shown to be not as strong as they were once thought to be. Couple that with the increasing stress people have that contributes to nightly teeth clenching, and you have even more problems of maintaining tooth bond strengths.
What to do? Nanotechnology to the rescue.
There’s a lot of brilliant research going on using what’s known as ‘guided tissue remineralization’. It is a means of producing special, tiny nano-sized crystals and sending them into the unmineralized spaces where the adhesion between tooth and bonded material is steadily lost. The result of this new remineralization? Your new tooth-colored fillings will last a great deal longer. And that’s great news!
One of the final goals of all this research will eventually be to finally replace the white bonded fillings you have in your mouth, and mix the filling matrial with a remineralized crystalline layer that will hopefully within a few short years make your filling last the lifetime of the tooth. And wouldn’t that be wonderful?
21st century dental care… it just keeps on getting better and better!
Edward M. Reifman, DDS
Note: For more information on how nanotechnology will impact dental care, read Dr. Reifman’s famous published chapter: ‘A Visit to the Dentist in the Year 2025’.
