Dental Restorations – Reasons for Placement and Replacement

The objective of the present study was to determine the clinical reasons leading to the decision of dental restoration placement and replacement. It was a descriptive case series study and was carried out from October 2010 to July, 2011 Sampling: Non-probability convenience sampling. From the city of Lahore, 30 dental clinics were selected randomly, after dividing the metropolis into six administrative zones with 5 dentists from each zone. All the thirty dentists from six zones were asked to register 100 consecutive direct restorations. The standard criteria proposed by Wilson et al8 was used to record the reasons for placement and replacement of the restorations. The response from the private practitioners for data collection was 70%. The remaining data was collected from the department of Operative Dentistry, Lahore Medical & Dental College, Lahore. The results of the present study revealed that the primary caries was the major reason (84.3%) for the placement of the initial restoration and secondary caries accounted for the majority (7.1%) of the replacement restoration in the Lahore city. It was concluded that the major reason for restoration placement and replacement was caries therefore there is a need for finding the factors that are responsible for high caries incidence in Lahore and efforts should be made to prevent the caries.