Historical perspective and actual concepts of the dentin enamel adhesive systems - literature review

Abstract

Since Buonocore, the adhesion to enamel remained consistent for decades. The adhesion to dentin turned out to be unpredictable which lead to consecutive modifications of the adhesive systems, with the purpose of overcoming the dentin adhesion difficulties. Due to the enormous variety of the adhesion systems available in the market, it is difficult to remain up to date about the mechanisms and advantages of all them. The introduction of the self etch systems has set the need of studying again the enamel adhesion. The purpose of this work is to systematize the evolution of the adhesive systems and expose the state of the art about this subject, with a special focus on the enamel adhesion.Survey was conducted in MEDLINE / PubMed, ScienceDirect and B-On with the keywords " Dental Adhesives" , " Dental Acid Etching" , " Dentin" , " Enamel" and " Self-etching adhesive systems" , limited to articles published in English, French and Portuguese between 1955 and 2011. © 2011 Sociedade Portuguesa de Estomatologia e Medicina Dentária.