Gender-Dependent Quality of Shade Matching of Dental Professionals and Students

The purpose of this study was to evaluate shade matching ability of dental professionals and students using the VITA 3D-Master shade guide.

A hundred and twenty participants have been assigned to one of four groups as follows: specialists in prosthodontics (SPs), residents in prosthodontics (RPs), dental technicians (DTs) and dental students (DSs). The Toothguide Training Box (TTB) was used to test the participants' shade-matching ability based on using 3 exercises and a final test. The mistakes were recorded during the exercises and mistake ratios (MR) were calculated. Time, scores, and color difference values (ΔE) were recorded and calculated. The one-way ANOVA was used to analyze the differences, and multiple regression analyses were used to evaluate the relationship in mean MRs, time, score and ΔE values between the groups.

Male participants needed significantly greater amount of time than females to complete the final test (P<0.05). Male SPs achieved a significantly lower percentage of mistake ratios in second exercise than RPs (P<0.05), needed significantly less time than DSs to complete the final test and achieved significantly higher scores than RPs (P<0.05). Female SPs assessed the highest and DSs and RPs the lowest color differences (P<0.05). The results obtained from the exercises and final tests highly affected the amount of estimated color difference in both male and female groups (by 78% and 76%, respectively).

Within the population tested, gender of the participants showed a significant impact on quality of shade matching of dental professionals and students.