Degradation of lingual orthodontics archwires

In 1970 Dr. Craven Kurz, a Northamerican §orthodontist based in Beverly Hills, who was an §associate professor of Occlusion and Gnathology at §the UCLA School of Dentistry, started investigating §the way of performing fixed multibracketed §treatments with a lingual approach, that is, by §bonding the brackets in the lingual and palatal §surfaces of teeth in order to make orthodontic §treatment invisible. Contemporarily, Dr. Kinya §Fujita, a Japanese orthodontist from the Kanagawa §Dental University, started investigating the same §approach for the orthodontic treatment so to §diminish the injuries that most of his patients had §when practising martial arts due to the appliances. §Since then, lingual orthodontics has become another §possible technique in treating malocclusions. The §purpose of this study was to analyse the corrosive §behaviour of archwires commonly used in lingual §orthodontics. This is done from different points of §view including corrosion testing in a potentiostat, §the analysis of nickel release, the study of the §changes in the calorimetric properties of the §archwires and the analysis of the topographic §changes through SEM and AFM.