Sealant Bond Strength to Enamel with and without Surface Treatment

Introduction: The ultimate goal of sealants is to penetrate into pit and fissures of teeth in order to seal them from bacteria. The ideal sealant material would have the following properties: high retention, excellent flow and wetability, low solubility, biocompatible, easy and fast to apply. Objective: To determine the shear bond strength (SBS) of a novel self-etching sealant to intact enamel. To investigate whether differences in surface treatment prior to sealing influenced the SBS to intact enamel.

Methods: Flat bonding sites were prepared on the buccal surfaces of bovine teeth by grinding the teeth on a water-cooled abrasive wheel.

Self-etching sealant, EnamelLoc, Premier Dental/BJM Laboratories (EL) was bonded to bovine enamel, according to the manufacturer instructions, with and without pre-treatment, utilizing high speed diamond bur (FB), diamond impregnated polishing brush (PB), disposable brush (DB) and newly developed surface active cleaning paste PreClean, Premier Dental/BJM Laboratories (PC). Conventional etching with phosphoric acid gel (QE) prior to resin sealant (EL) application was used as the control. Shear bond strength (SBS) was measured in accordance with ISO/TS11405:2003. The experimental results were statistically analyzed (N=10) by ANOVA (p<0.05).

Results: The SBS (MPa) test results are presented in the following table.

Pre-Treatment	SBS to Un-Cut Bovine Enamel, MPa
EL (without any treatment)	13.4±1.6
FB->EL	20.1±1.8
DB->EL	16.6±2.7
PB->EL	11.4±3.9
DB with PC->EL	30.8±2.3
QE->EL	36.7±4.6

Conclusions:

Pretreatment utilizing a disposable brush with PreClean, prior to application of the self etch sealant, exhibited significantly higher SBS compared to the other groups, close to the one shown by the control.