Dental composites

IIn addition to the constraints related to chewing, our teeth are subjected to multiple stresses day after day that can cause irreversible damages. Shocks or inappropriate mechanical stresses can lead, in the medium to long term, to the fracture of a tooth. A sugar rich diet, poor oral and dental hygiene, certain types of addictions can cause tooth decay with multiple health consequences. Tooth decay is the third most common pathology in the world. For example, 92% of French people have already suffered from caries, and eight out of ten on several occasions! All of these inconveniences require more or less complicated to implement care, depending on the extent of damage to the tooth and their position thereon. In the past, practitioners only had amalgam or poorly controlled or expensive restorative materials at their disposal. The unsightly nature of the resulting repairs, combined with the necessary sacrifice of healthy tissue led researchers to develop, since the mid-1950s, an alternative and high-performance solution: dental composites. These biomaterials have been developed in conjunction with the chemical treatment of teeth on the one hand and dental adhesives on the other hand. It then became possible to make the restoration adherent, the healthy tissue economy in this field was born.

After a brief history of the field of dental restoration and some definitions, the article focuses on the different classifications of dental composites. It then aims to describe in details to the readers (and potential patients), to the practitioners or to the actors of the materials development, the composition and the properties of the dental composites. The article also aims to show the multidisciplinary nature of this topic that has led to the optimization of current dental composites and to the revolution that these materials represent in restorative dentistry.