Abstract
Zirconia has recently become one of the most popular dental materials in prosthodontics being used in crowns, bridges, and implants. However, weak bonding strength of dental adhesives and resins to zirconia surface has been a grand challenge in dentistry, thus finding a better adhesion to zirconia is urgently required. Marine sessile organisms such as mussels use a unique priming strategy to produce a strong bonding to wet mineral surfaces; one of the distinctive chemical features in the mussel’s adhesive primer proteins is high catechol contents among others. In this study, we pursued a bioinspired adhesion strategy, using a synthetic catechol primer applied to dental zirconia surfaces to study the effect of catecholic priming to shear bond strength. Catechol priming provided a statistically significant enhancement (p < 0.05) in shear bond strength compared to the bonding strength without priming, and relatively stronger bonding than commercially available zirconia priming techniques. This new bioinspired dental priming approach can be an excellent addition to the practitioner’s toolkit to improve dental bonding to zirconia.
Highlights
Ceramics have been widely used for dental and biomaterials, e.g., for prostheses
We investigated if one of the most pressing issues in prosthodontics—poor of literature regarding phosphate-primers, and despite over 10,000 peer-reviewed papers published adhesion to zirconia—could be overcome with catecholic bioinspired surface priming
We investigated if one of the most pressing issues in prosthodontics—poor adhesion acidic phosphate and carboxylate functionality
Summary
Zirconia has recently become one of the most popular ceramic dental and biomaterials with its superior mechanical properties: highly tough and strong, wear resistant, shock resistant, while both chemically and dimensionally stable [1]. Its superior mechanical properties are due to a martensitic type phase transformation that prevents crack propagation [2]. Traditional mechanical grinding or sand blasting methods on dental ceramics can be an alternative, but it may cause the phase transformation and hydrothermal fatigue degradation [3]. Silane-based primers (known as silane coupling agents) are commonly used to prime dental surfaces, including ceramics. Despite many attempts to improve the bonding strength to zirconia using silane-based coupling agents, no significant improvement has been reported yet [3]
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