Initial corrosion of amalgams in vitro

Abstract

– The amounts of copper, mercury, silver or zinc released from two brands of freshly prepared, lathe cut amalgams and from one brand of dispersed phase type amalgam into artificial saliva have been measured. Samples were immersed in the solution a few minutes after the end of trituration and exposed statically for periods of up to about 4 days. The initial mercury release from such specimens could exceed the long term mercury release from old amalgams by more than two orders of magnitude. The measurements indicate that during the first day after insertion of two amalgam fillings, each with an assumed surface area of 1 cm2 and under presumably static conditions, mercury at the level of more than twice the mercury food and drink intake could be released in the oral cavity. This is, however, a situation which appears infrequently, e.g. following dental treatment once a year. The amounts of copper and zinc released initially were considerably lower than the corresponding food and drink intake values, while silver might be on the same level. The measurements were conducted using nuclear tracer techniques.

Correlation between Amalgam Restorations and Mercury Concentrations in Urine

“…Mercury is released as metallic vapor (Gay et al, 1979;Mayer, 1980;Svare et al, 1981;Vimy and Lorscheider, 1985;Patterson et al, 1985), ions (Brune, 1981;Brune et al, 1983;Brune and Evje, 1984;Moberg, 1985), and particles (Brune, 1981;Her0 et al, 1983) from amalgam, but the absolute or even relative amounts are insufficiently explored for the various types of amalgam to deduce which amalgams would contribute most to the urine mercury level. In the present study, too few of the participants had all their restorations made of only one type of amalgam to make any comparison between the types of amalgam in relation to their effect on urine mercury level.…”

“…Dental amalgams release small amounts of mercury in the form of metallic vapor (Gay et al, 1979;Mayer, 1980;Svare et al, 1981;Vimy and Lorscheider, 1985;Patterson et al, 1985) and ions (Brune, 1981;Brune et al, 1983;Brune and Evje, 1984) and in particulate matter (Brune, 1981;Her0 et al, 1983). Several authors have examined to what extent such release contributes to the total body burden of mercury, by relating the blood and/or the urine content of Hg to the amount of dental amalgam restorations (Kr6ncke et al, 1980;Ott et al, 1984;Abraham et al, 1984).…”

The Release of Mercury from Dental Amalgam: The Mechanism and in vitro Testing

“…Numerous laboratory studies of mercury dissolution into solutions simulating the oral liquids have been reported (Babendererde et al, 1970;Oyama, 1974;Kawahara et al, 1976Kawahara et al, , 1979Kawahara et al, , 1981Takahashi et al, 1981;Kozono et al, 1982;Brune et al, 1983;Habu et al, 1983;Hero et al, 1983;Ohta, 1983;Brune and Evje, 1984;Brune, 1985;Brune and Evje, 1985;Ferracane et al, 1986;Ahmad and Stannard, 1987;Chung et al, 1987;Marek, 1987;Okabe et al, 1987;Ferracane et al, 1988a;Marek, 1988). The summarized results of some of these studies (Okabe et al, 1987) show an extremely wide range of the reported rates of the release.…”

Tin and copper release related to charge transfer between short‐circuited amalgam and gold alloy electrodes

“…These elements are those most commonly reported to occur in amalgam corrosion products (22). However, under the current experimental conditions the quantity of copper released from the specimens in NaCl was small or below the detection limit, ,and could not be related to the charge transfer.…”