The kinetics of mineralization of human dentin in vitro.

The prospect of restoration of damaged dental tissues has recently attracted great interest. An understanding of the remineralization of human dentin in vitro was attempted by using super-saturated calcium phosphate solutions at sustained supersaturation by means of a constant solution composition method. The direct growth of HAP from solutions of low supersaturation on powdered whole human dentin was confirmed. Moreover, it was found that the kinetics were similar to those of the seeded growth at synthetic HAP. A high apparent activation energy pointed to a surface-controlled mechanism.