- Abstract -

Objectives: Matching the shade of a porcelain-fused-to-metal restoration to that of the natural teeth is an important goal of the restorative dentist. We aimed to compare patients’, student's and prosthodontist’s satisfaction with the achieved shade of porcelain-fused-to-metal restorations.

Methods: One or more porcelain-fused-to-metal crowns in the anterior zone were completed in 23 patients who needed prosthetic rehabilitation. After treatment’s completion, a validated questionnaire to assess satisfaction with the shade match was used in all patients, one student and the prosthodontist who supervised these procedures. The Kendall’s tau-b statistic and the Weighted κ Statistic were used to analyze the level of agreement between the ratings given by patients, the prosthodontist and the student.

Results: Patients rated 86.95% of the crowns’ shade as good, and 13.04% were rated as satisfactory. The prosthodontist rated 30.55% crowns’ shade as good, 52.77% as satisfactory and 16.67 % as poor, and the student rated 69.44% and 30.55% of the crowns’ shade as good and satisfactory respectively. The level of agreement between student and prosthodontist, as computed by the weighted κ, was 0.25, and the level of agreement between patients and prosthodontist was 0.09.

Conclusions: With this simple tool, we demonstrated that although the majority of patients were highly satisfied with the shade-match of the restoration, the level of agreement between patients and prosthodontist was low. However the patient satisfaction is the most important goal of the aesthetic restorations and this was achieved in this cohort.

Key words: porcelain-fused-to-metal crown, shade perception, shade guide.