Dental filling materials got a bad rap decades ago before the introduction of the current standard of a variety of tooth colored filling materials, starting with composit resins and getting more sophisticated over the years with harder and more durable compositions. Those early silver fillings were amalgam fillings and were used for a century.
Amalgam fillings as the name would suggest were a composition of lots of different metal powders combined with mercury. In the 1960s movement towards a healthy lifestyle, and questioning all the additives we put into our foodstuff, skin care products and more started to bloom. A dental filling material containing mercury of all things was called into question. Long story short, the mercury ionically bonded to other parts of the composition, and with that new molecular structure was stable, but there was always an unfounded suspicion of the possibility that it could leech out of the filling into our bodies. The ADA and many others ran tests that showed this was not happening and there never was a conclusive case showing cause and damaging effect. Anyway those materials are history as the public became more interested in esthetically invisible tooth colored materials. Some older people still have some silver fillings, but dentistry has capitalized on removing them (unnecessarily, but dentist are a business not just part of our healthcare team) and replacing them with something longer lasting, and essentially not visible. It’s an easy sale, and the lifespan of an amalgam filling is only about 15 years anyway.
The new materials have been put through the safety wringer and there are no material issues in them to be concerned with. But one thing that has been suspect in some oral cancers for a long time, but not conclusively proven, is tissue irritation and abrasion happening chronically over years causing cellular transformations, even cancer. We all know that on our hands and elsewhere, that the body’s normal response to this is to build up a callous to protect itself. While we don’t form callouses in the moist cells of our mouths, benign tissue changes certainly occur as a response to chronic tissue irritation. Whether these rough areas of a poorly done filling can do something more than irritate, and ultimately cascade into a malignancy has been suggested as possible, but not conclusively proven. This is a function of poorly done dentistry and not material. Fillings that are not finished properly and smoothly will cause chronic irritation to the tissues they come in contact with. Smoothing or reshaping them is a simple procedure if this is noticed. Perhaps by someone other than the person who did a poor job on the original restoration.
That’s a long answer to your question, but done well, dental restorations are not on the list of things that we need to concern ourselves with related to oral cancer.
Last edited by Brian Hill; 02-18-2022 03:29 PM.
