Clinical relevance of tests on bond strength, microleakage and marginal adaptation

Dental adhesive systems should provide a variety of capabilities, such as bonding of artificial materials to dentin and enamel, sealing of dentinal tubules, reduction of post-operative sensitivity and marginal sealing to reduce marginal staining and caries. In the laboratory, numerous surrogate parameters that should predict the performance of different materials, material combinations and operative techniques are assessed. These surrogate parameters include bond strength tests of various kinds, evaluation of microleakage with tracer penetration between restorative and tooth, two-dimensional analysis of marginal quality with microscopes and mapping of the micromorphology of the bonding interface. Many of these tests are not systematically validated and show therefore different results between different research institutes. The correlation with clinical phenomena has only partly been established to date. There is some evidence, that macrotensile and microtensile bond strength tests correlate better with clinical retention of cervical restorations than macroshear and microshear bond tests but only if data from different test institutes are pooled. Also there is some evidence that marginal adaptation has a moderate correlation in cervical restorations with clinical retention and in Class II restorations (proximal enamel) with clinical marginal staining. There is moderate evidence that microleakage tests with dye penetration does not correlate with any of the clinical parameters (post-operative hypersensitivity, retention, marginal staining). A rationale which helps the researcher to select and apply clinically relevant test methods in the laboratory is presented in the paper.