Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION the pressures exerted from the facial and oral soft
tissues, occlusal forces, and posttreatment facial
Relapse is considered to be any change in tooth
growth and development.2 Clinicians have little or no
position or arch relationship that occurs during the
control over the influence of growth and soft tissue
initial posttreatment period.1 The exact causes of
factors on relapse, which adds to the difficulty of
relapse are difficult to identify, but there are thought managing the problem.
to be four factors that are responsible for its Over the past 30 years, several studies have
occurrence: the elastic recoil of the periodontal tissues, evaluated long-term dental stability following different
orthodontic treatment modalities.3–7 All of these studies
a
Specialist Orthodontist, St Luke’s Hospital, Bradford, UK. have had a minimum follow-up period of 10 years,
b
Consultant Orthodontist, St Luke’s Hospital, Bradford, UK.
extending to 20 years. Most of the treatment modal-
c
Lecturer in Biostatistics, Centre for Epidemiology & Biosta-
tistics, University of Leeds, Leeks, UK. ities—which included non-extraction, first premolar
d
Lecturer in Dental Materials, Leeds Dental Institute, Faculty extraction, second premolar extraction, serial extrac-
of Medicine and Health, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. tion, and expansion treatment—showed long-term
Corresponding author: Dr Taiyub Raja, Department of relapse rates of up to 70%.
Orthodontics, St Luke’s Hospital, Little Horton Ln, Bradford,
Vacuum-formed retainers (VFRs) are removable,
BD5 0NA, UK
(e-mail: taiyub_raja@hotmail.com) clear, thermoplastic retainers. Ponitz8 first described
their use for the purpose of orthodontic retention in
Accepted: October 2013. Submitted: June 2013.
Published Online: December 23, 2013 1971. Since being introduced into the UK National
G 2014 by The EH Angle Education and Research Foundation, Health Service fee structure in 1996, the rate of
Inc. increase in the use of VFRs has been approximately
nine times greater than that of Hawley retainers.9 A The material used as an antagonist has also been
vacuum machine adapts heat-softened plastic by the subject of much debate in the literature. A broad
negative pressure, creating a vacuum, and pulls the variety of antagonist materials, such as human
plastic onto a working study cast. The two most enamel, stainless steel, steatite, and dental porcelain,
common materials used for VFRs are polyethylene co- have been used, yet there appears to be no consensus
polymers and polypropylene polymers. on which of these materials is the most appropriate for
Polyethylene polymers have the advantage of use during wear testing.16–19
allowing acrylic to be bonded to the material and, The aim of this study was to investigate the
thus, are the plastic of choice when bite planes need to resistance to wear of four different commercially
be incorporated into the appliance. The material is also available VFR materials—Essix C+, Essix ACE,
some minor modifications made for this study. The Each specimen was abraded for 1000 cycles of the
Statistical Analysis
Data analysis was carried out using SPSS version
16.0 (SPSS Inc, Chicago, Ill). The wear depth was
summarized using medians, interquartile range,
means, and standard deviations. The data in each
group were checked for Normality using a Shapiro-
Wilk test. The data violated the assumptions of
Normality and constant-variance required for analysis
of variance (P , .00); hence, nonparametric tests were
used in this study. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to
investigate whether differences existed between the
groups; where significance was found, further com-
parisons of groups were conducted using the Mann-
Figure 1. The heating element of the vacuum-forming machine
Whitney U-test for unpaired data.
acting on the VFR sheet. The acrylic template is in place over the A P value of .05 was considered to be statistically
vacuum area. significant. A Bonferroni correction was applied to the
P value to take into account the multiple comparisons were originally done. A Bland-Altman plot was used to
that were to be made. As six comparisons were assess intrarater agreement between the two read-
required in total, the new P value was calculated by ings.22 In addition to the Bland-Altman plot, bias
dividing .05 (the old P value) by 6 (the number of estimates and 95% limits of agreement were calculated.
comparisons conducted).21 Thus, the P value used to
indicate significance in the Mann-Whitney U-test was
RESULTS
.01 (rounded up to two decimal places).
To ensure consistency of the results, all the wear- Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics for the wear
depth measurements were repeated 2 weeks after they depth in the four treatment groups. The median wear
Figure 4. Proscan-produced cross-sectional and three-dimensional views of sample 20 from the Essix C+ group.
depth for the Essix C+ group was 63.20 mm, much The box-and-whisker plot in Figure 5 shows that
higher than the median wear depth in the other groups. Essix C+ had a much greater median wear depth
The median wear depth was 7.88 mm in the Essix ACE and more variation than the other three materials.
group, 9.75 mm in the Duran group, and 12.08 mm in The box plot demonstrates that the data was
the Tru-Tain group. skewed.
Table 2. Median Wear Depth and Other Numerical Descriptive Statistics of the Groupsa
95% CI for Mean
Group Median, mm IQR Range Mean (SD) Lower Limit Upper Limit
Essix C+ 63.20 14.41 22.47 65.50 (7.66) 62.41 68.59
Essix ACE 7.88 5.09 15.25 9.80 (4.51) 7.98 11.62
Duran 9.75 3.67 11.70 10.26 (3.10) 9.01 11.51
Tru-Tain 12.08 11.41 19.60 14.03 (5.99) 11.62 16.45
a
n 5 26 per group. IQR indicates interquartile range; SD, standard deviation; CI, confidence interval.
The intrarater agreement was good, as demonstrat- The Kruskal-Wallis test showed that there were
that the Essix C+ group showed significantly more polyethylene copolymer, TR. Essix C+ was, therefore,
wear than the other three groups. The only other tested in both studies.
statistically significant difference was between the Gardner et al.15 reported that the mean wear in the
Essix ACE and Tru-Tain groups, with Essix ACE Essix C+ group was 5.9 mm, in the Invisacryl C group it
material shown to have less wear. was 6.1 mm, and in the TR group it was 1.6 mm. The
TR group (polyethylene copolymer) demonstrated
DISCUSSION significantly less wear than the two polypropylene
groups. The results in that study indicated that the
The laboratory study by Gardner et al.15 described in
polypropylene materials had 3.7 to 3.8 times greater
the introduction is the only published study the authors
wear than the polyethylene material under their
have found investigating the wear properties of VFRs.
standardized wear trial.
In that study, the authors tested three different VFR
The current study tested one polypropylene materi-
products, two of which were polypropylene polymers—
al, Essix C+, and three polyethylene copolymer based
Essix C+ and Invisacryl C—while the third was a
materials, Essix ACE, Duran, and Tru-Tain. The
Table 3. Summary of the Results Obtained Using the MWU Test to
median was used to report the findings, as the data
Compare VFR Groupsa were found to be nonparametric. The difference in
median wear depth between the Essix C+ group and
Comparison MWU P Value Result
the other three groups was statistically significant.
1. Essix C+ vs Essix ACE .001 Significant difference
Median wear depth in the Essix C+ group was eight
2. Essix C+ vs Duran .001 Significant difference
3. Essix C+ vs Tru-Tain .001 Significant difference times greater than that in the Essix ACE group, 6.4
4. Essix ACE vs Duran .170 No difference times greater than that in the Duran group, and 4.7
5. Essix ACE vs Tru-Tain .002 Significant difference times greater than that in the Tru-Tain group.
6. Duran vs Tru-Tain .028 No difference Though both studies used different summary mea-
a
MWU indicates Mann-Whitney U; VFR, vacuum-formed retainer. sures, the results show a similar, statistically significant
trend. The findings of this study and the study by N An appropriately designed, randomized, controlled
Gardner et al.15 indicate that the polyethylene-based clinical trial may be helpful to determine whether
materials are at least 3.7 times more wear resistant these findings are replicated in vivo.
than the polypropylene materials. In total, both
studies have looked at six different widely available
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
VFR materials. Sheridan et al.10 stated that Essix C+
was extremely resistant to wear without providing The VFR materials used in this study were kindly provided by
supporting evidence. However, two laboratory stud- Ortho-Care, Bradford, UK (Essix C+ and Essix ACE); Euro-
dontic, Sheffield, UK (Duran); and Archform, Sheffield, UK
ies have now found that polyethylene copolymers are (Tru-Tain). Our thanks also go to Nigel Jacques, Elizabeth
more resistant to wear than polypropylene materials Hepburn, Michael Pullan, and Rashid Mian for their technical
17. Shortall AC, Hu XQ, Marquis PM. Potential countersample 20. Harrison A, Lewis TT. The development of an abrasion
materials for in-vitro simulation wear testing. Dent Mater. testing machine for dental materials. J Biomed Mater Res.
2002;18:246–254. 1975;9:341–353.
18. Casey J, Dunn WJ, Wright E. In vitro wear of various orthotic 21. Bland MJ, Altman DG. Multiple significance tests: the
device materials. J Prosthet Dent. 2003;90:498–502. Bonferroni method. Br Med J. 1995;310(6973):170.
19. Ghazal M, Albashaireh ZS, Kern M. Wear resistance of 22. Bland MJ, Altman DG. Statistical methods for assessing
nanofilled composite resin and feldspathic ceramic artificial agreement between two methods of clinical measurement.
teeth. J Prosthet Dent. 2008;100:441–448. Lancet. 1986;327(8476):307–310.