Outcome of direct restorations placed within the general dental services in England and Wales (Part 2): Variation by patients' characteristics

AIM: It is the purpose of this paper to investigate the outcome of direct-placement restorations provided within the General Dental Services in England and Wales, and to identify the patient factors which may affect this using a database derived from patient treatment data at the Dental Practice Board. METHODS: For this work, survival of a restoration was considered to be the time between the date of completion of the course of treatment in which it was placed and the date of acceptance of the course of treatment when the next tooth-specific treatment was carried out on the same tooth. A modified version of Kaplan-Meier statistical methodology was used to plot survival curves for restorations in different subgroups of patients within the population of patients for whom data were available. RESULTS: The results indicated that patients' gender was of little significance in the long-term survival of restorations, but patient age had a significant effect, with the restorations of older patients surviving less well than those of younger patients (P