Audit on failures rates for bonded orthodontic brackets

Failure of bonded orthodontic brackets is an inconvenience all round. It potentially slows down treatment and sometimes involves the patient having to re-attend for an additional emergency visit. Therefore anything which can be done to reduce this is an advantage all round.

An audit of 100 consecutive patients starting treatment revealed an overall bond failure rate of 8.3%. This compared favourably with other studies which report figures varying from 4 - 30%. The result did however vary significantly between operators and tooth types and we looked at reasons why this might be the case. We noticed that one tooth preparation technique was more successful than the other. Another recent study demonstrated that bond failures could be reduced by using a newly available adhesive primer and a lower profile bracket so we also adopted these. Re-auditing the process afterwards demonstrated a reduction in the bond failure rate to 2.5%.