The effects of alcoholic beverages on composite wear

In vivo wear of composite restorative materials appears to be, in part, dependent on various patient factors. Specifically, consumption of alcoholic beverages has the potential for increasing the degradation rate. The hypothesis tested in this experiment was that composite wear is dependent on the type of alcohol-containing liquid the materials are exposed to during three-body abrasive wear.

To test this hypothesis, composite wear experiments were performed using the ACTA three-body wear machine. Abrasive slurries containing either beer, wine, 9 vol% ethanol or water were used during the wear experiments. The data were analyzed using ANOVA and Tukey's test.

The wine and ethanol solutions caused significantly more wear compared to the beer and water. There was no significant differences in the wear between the wine and 9 vol% ethanol groups, and the beer groups were not significantly different from the water groups. Furthermore, there was no significant interaction between the composite type and the various abrasive slurries.

These results indicate that alcoholic beverages with at least 9 vol% ethanol will increase the wear of composite. The observed increase in wear of composite by the wine was caused primarily by the ethanol content of the wine. Other constituents in the wine do not appear to have an effect on composite wear. The ethanol effect was consistent among different composite types.