Zirconia: As a biocompatible biomaterial used in dental implants

Abstract

Zirconia is a bioinert ceramic biomaterial. Zirconia having composition of 97% Zirconia oxide and 3% Yttria oxide finds its vital application in the field of dental ceramics as an implant material for having good inert characteristics like minimum interaction with the adjacent tissues and exhibits good aesthetic property. This paper presents the in-vitro tests conducted to evaluation toxicity by cell culturing on zirconia biomaterial used in the dental implant by both direct contact and extraction method. In the present study, in-vitro assessment of tissue biocompatibility was conducted on L929 cell line (mouse fibroblast). In-vitro test, the toxicity of Zirconia specimen was done by computing percentage of viability in a cell-cultured medium. An MTT system was used to measure the active cell activities with mitochondrial dehydrogenases, which is an easy method which gives accurate and precision results. The results of biocompatibility in-vitro test by both Direct and Extraction methods confirmed that Zirconia exhibits the highest cell growth of 93.17% and resulted with zero-grade cytotoxicity. Zirconia having good aesthetic characteristics, i.e. colour of the implant matches with the tooth colour. Hence Zirconia is a candidate implant material than other metal implants.