Defective composite restorations--repair or replace?

DATA SOURCES: The Cochrane Oral Health Group's Trials Register, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), Medline, Embase, BIOSIS via Web of Knowledge, Web of Science and Opengrey databases were searched. In addition researchers and experts in the field were contacted to trace unpublished or ongoing studies. No restrictions were placed on the language or date of publication. STUDY SELECTION: Randomised controlled trials (including split-mouth studies), involving replacement and repair of resin composite restorations in adults with a defective molar restoration in a permanent molar or premolar teeth were to be considered. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS: Two review authors independently assessed titles and abstracts for each article identified by the searches in order to decide whether the article was likely to be relevant. Full papers were obtained for relevant articles and both review authors studied these. The Cochrane Collaboration statistical guidelines were followed for data synthesis.
RESULTS: The search strategy retrieved 298 potentially eligible studies, after de-duplication. After examination of the titles and abstracts, full texts of potentially relevant studies were retrieved, but none of the retrieved studies met the inclusion criteria of the review.
CONCLUSIONS: There are no published randomised controlled trials relevant to this review question. Therefore there is a need for methodologically sound randomised controlled trials that are reported according to the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement (www.consort-statement.org/). Further research also needs to explore qualitatively the views of patients on repairing versus replacement, and investigate themes around pain, anxiety and distress, time and costs.