Dental Materials in Vivo, Ageing and Related Phenomena

  • G. Eliades,
  • T. Eliades,
  • W. A. Brantley &
  • D. C. Watts
Surrey: Quintessence, 2003 price £76, pp296 ISBN 0867153997 | ISBN: 0-867-15399-7

The book is a refreshing and important addition to the current dental biomaterials literature. The way that dental materials age and deteriorate in the oral environment is extremely important and generally has been neglected in the main dental materials textbooks.

The advantage of this book is that it uses evidence from in vivo studies as the basis for each chapter rather than speculation from laboratory based studies. To this end a large amount of scientific literature has been collated and summarised in this book, which in itself makes it a valuable read. However this is far more than a review of current literature with each chapter being a thorough explanation of the ageing and deterioration of all the important clinically used materials.

As a lecturer in dental materials I'm sure I will find this book very useful for both teaching and research. The depth of scientific knowledge within the book will I'm sure stimulate research ideas and certainly will be of great help to dental biomaterial researchers. In addition clinicians and students should find it equally interesting in particular with the information on procedures to minimise the ageing problems of dental materials in vivo. The book is also well written and illustrated and I recommend it to clinicians and scientists alike.