Abstrait

Clinical innovations for successful mandibular complete denture prosthesis

Maninder Hundal

The effect of new well fitting, aesthetic, functional complete dentures on a patient’s social life and sense of wellbeing is often dramatic. With the advancement in dental education of patients, advent of dental implants and progress in various other dental material and techniques, there arose a belief that complete denture patients will become rare in the immediate future and therefore complete denture prosthodontics is a dying art. Contrary to these opinions, data indicates that the number of patients requiring complete dentures will continue to increase in the foreseeable future. Further not every edentulous patient can be rehabilitated with dental implants for various medical and socioeconomic reasons. The conventional complete denture fabrication procedure is elaborate, technique sensitive and time consuming demanding lot of skill and clinical experience from the dental surgeon. Very often despite multiple visits of the complete denture patient, the dental surgeon is not able to deliver a successful prosthesis resulting in frequent complaints of denture soreness, difficulty in chewing, speaking, looseness of the dentures etc. The edentulous mandible with its relatively decreased denture bearing area, interference by the tongue, smaller amounts of masticatory mucosa and two to three times larger movable volume of the muccobuccal fold poses a greater challenge as compared to its maxillary counterpart. This scientific presentation will revisit various innovations in materials as well as techniques from the conventional retention and stabilisation type of mandibular complete denture to the recent suction effective one furthering upon the bio functional prosthetic technique with the help of various clinical case reports