A laboratory and clinical evaluation of three dental luting cements.

The loss of material from specimens of three luting cements was measured after continuous erosion cycling in the laboratory. The glass ionomer luting cement showed significantly less material loss than the zinc polycarboxylate and zinc phosphate luting cements. Two hundred and fifty restorations cemented with one of the three materials were studied clinically for marginal integrity and retention over 3.5 years. The data were tested using survival analysis. Zinc phosphate cement gave the best clinical performance. Possible explanations for the poor correlation between the findings in the laboratory and clinical study are discussed.