P. Kalyani, M. Dhanraj, Ashish R. Jain

Abstract

Marginal discrepancy in crowns and bridges can pave way to secondary caries, endodontal, periodontal problems, etc. As marginal discrepancy is also influenced by the type of alloy used, it was decided to review systematically the influence of different alloys on marginal discrepancy. The study is to compare and evaluate the amount of marginal discrepancy in complete veneer crowns fabricated using base metal and noble metal alloy. An electronic search was initiated for scholarly articles on crowns and bridges, base metal alloys crowns, noble metal alloy crowns and marginal discrepancy. The search was PubMed based. The search methodology applied was a combination of MESH terms and suitable keywords based on PICO formulated for the review. Suitable keywords were formulated for PICO and subjected to advanced search using Boolean operators. The search strategy yielded 17 articles. 6 were excluded following reading extract and 11 were selected for full-text reading. Of these 6 were excluded based on exclusion criteria. Finally, 5 articles were included for final search. Data extraction was done from the selected articles. The extracted data were analyzed statistically. The mean marginal discrepancy incurred by base metal alloy was 125.7 ± 43.03. The mean marginal discrepancy incurred by noble metal alloy was 56.723 ± 34.14. Meta analysis showed a statistically significant difference in the amount of marginal discrepancy incurred by base metal alloys than noble metal alloys with overall effect size of Z = 7.57, P < 0.00001, respectively. This study revealed that the base metal alloys incurred more marginal discrepancy than noble metal alloys. However, the marginal discrepancy incurred is considered clinically acceptable.