Occlusal Contact Outcomes with Invisalign® Lite Treatment

Abstract Objective To investigate the relationship between pre-treatment, predicted post-treatment, and clinically achieved numbers and locations of occlusal contact in cases treated using the Invisalign® Lite appliance (Align Technology, San Jose, California, USA). Materials and Methods Following the application of exclusion and inclusion criteria, 34 patients treated with the Invisalign® Lite appliance were selected. Occlusal contacts were measured at the initial, predicted, and achieved stages on amiga disc file (.adf file) files using the imaging software ImageJ (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA). Descriptive statistics were calculated. Predicted values were provided by Align Technology’s treatment planning software interface, ClinCheck®. Results Most patients were female (n = 29; 85.3%) and the mean (standard deviation) age of the sample was 33.4 (10.72) years. There were significant differences between the initial pre-treatment number of maxillary premolar and molar occlusal contacts and the achieved (a reduction of 58.97%; P < 0.0001), and the total initial pre-treatment number of premolar and molar occlusal mandibular contacts and the achieved (a reduction of 52.5%; P < 0.0001). A significant reduction in the number of posterior occlusal contacts was observed when the achieved number of posterior occlusal contacts was compared to the numbers predicted via ClinCheck® (p<0.0001). Conclusions For minor tooth movement treatment with Invisalign® Lite, more than 50% loss of posterior contact was observed in the achieved outcome when compared to either the initial or predicted number of occlusal contacts.