EVALUATION OF CA-P COATINGS IN ANIMAL-EXPERIMENTS - IMPORTANCE OF STUDY DESIGN

During the last decennium the research on oral implants has increased considerably. A lot of different implant materials and types have been tested, but differences in study design and evaluation criteria make comparison of the results difficult. The purpose of this paper is to d iscuss surgical, statistical, and histological methods for testing and evaluating the biocompatibility of oral implants. Many formulas are a vailable for calculating the required group size. The paper describes how such calculations can be used for the evaluation of implants and r eviews the preferred surgical techniques. The control of various exter nal influences that can contribute to the variability in obtained data are discussed. After implantation, the implants with their surroundin g tissues are retrieved and subjected to histological evaluation. Curr ently, because of technical limitations, light microscopical sectionin g is still the preferred preparation technique. After sectioning, quan titative analysis has to be performed The parameters that can be evalu ated are described. Finally, the use and potential of the described te chniques are demonstrated with two examples.