Dental Fillings Debate

SEATTLE (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Open wide! Most of us have our share of metal in our mouths.

"I've got a lot of fillings. I have fillings that have been removed and replaced twice," Susan Stillman says. But are they safe? She doesn't think they're a problem.

Dentists have been using silver fillings for more than a century. Researchers recently discovered they cause mercury exposure. Now, there's debate over their safety in kids and whether composite fillings should be the only way to go. But two new studies show silver fillings do not harm children. When compared to the tooth-colored composite fillings, researchers found kids with the silver were exposed to more mercury, but the levels were too low to affect them.

"What we have is objective evidence," Timothy DeRouen, Ph.D., a dental health researcher at University of Washington in Seattle, tells Ivanhoe.

He studied the two groups of children for seven years. "We saw no differences over time in these two," he says. "They seemed to develop and do identically on the neurobehavioral tests that were conducted."

But some dentists believe mercury in silver is harmful and dispute the findings. They argue the fillings can cause autism and neurological damage.

"They say that the exposure is low, but they never actually said in the article how much mercury the children were exposed to," Jessica Saepoff, D.D.S., of Natural Dental Health Associates in Issaquah, Wash., tells Ivanhoe. "Mercury is known to be a neurotoxin, and the World Health Organization has said there is no safe level."

But most dentists say as long as there is nothing that proves they are unsafe, they'll keep on filling with silver.

Silver fillings cost $40 to $50 less than composite fillings. They're used less often in the United States, and fillings in general are also decreasing as the number of cavities decreases.

This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.

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