What's new from IADR?

The International Association for Dental Research holds one major meeting per year, with a number of (smaller) divisional meetings for Europe, Asia, Scandinavia, etc. The process is that researchers submit abstracts and, if these are accepted, the researchers subsequently attend the meeting and present their findings, either in poster format or as an oral presentation. Major meetings generally have more than 3,000 abstracts. Readers will, by now, have understood that attendance at these meetings is a good way of finding out the results of the latest research, worldwide. Of course, a lot of the work presented is cutting edge basic science, but it is relatively simple to seek out the presentations which have a strong clinical message. My main interest is the clinical application of dental materials, so those are the presentations which I attended. Here are some of the salient points which I gleaned.

Readers of Dental Update will be aware that self-etch dentine-bonding agents were developed circa 10 years ago, with rejoicing from myself and others that we might soon be able to manage the bonding process without using phosphoric acid.1 Among the first hints that that was not so was in a paper by Peumanns and colleagues, who suggested the term selective enamel etching, meaning etch the enamel but not the dentine. They used Clearfil SE (Kuraray) and obtained good retention in Class V cavities at 5, and subsequently 8, years,2 but the margins were better when they had been etched. The word on the street at the research meeting is that it is likely that the technique of selectively etching the enamel probably applies to the majority of bonding agents in the self-etch class, although more clinical trials need to be carried out. While on the subject of dentine bonding, a paper (#271)3 from the University of Birmingham, Alabama, concluded that 15 years’ water storage did not result in any degradation of the resin-dentine interface – a reassuring finding! Optibond FL (Kerr), long regarded as a gold standard, was the bonding agent in this work.