Krishna Chaithanya Reddy
Background: The stainless steel crowns (SSC) offers the advantage of full coronal coverage following pulpotomy or pulpectomy treatments. Despite careful crimping and contouring, gingival margins of SSCs are often less than perfectly adapted and lead to gingival inflammation. Luting cements play an important role in retention of crowns, obtaining a suitable marginal seal and reducing microleakage. So this study was conducted to evaluate and compare the microleakage and tensile bond strength of stainless steel crowns cemented with GC Fuji I cement, Rely XTM luting 2 cement and new self-adhesive cement that is Smart cemTM 2 cement. Material and methods: Tooth preparation was performed on 90 extracted primary molar teeth for SSC restoration. Two groups of 45 samples each for microleakage and tensile bond strength tests were performed and further subdivided into 15 for each of the three cement groups, cemented glass ionomer (GIC), resin-modified glass ionomer cement (RMGIC) or Smart cemTM 2 cement. The samples for evaluation of microleakage were then processed for dye penetration which was scored under a stereomicroscope and tensile bond strength was evaluated by Instron testing machine. Results: The data were analysed using version 20 of the SPSS. Mean microleakage value of Smart CemTM2 cement was less when compared to Rely XTM luting 2 cement (p<0.002**) and GC Fuji I cement (p<0.0001**) and it was statistically highly significant. Mean tensile bond strength of Smart CemTM2 cement was high when compared with GC Fuji I cement and Rely XTM luting 2 cement and it was statistically highly significant (p<0.0001**). Conclusion: Self-adhesive cements were more effective in reducing microleakage and they yielded higher tensile bond strength in cementing stainless steel crowns than adhesive cements.