When a tooth is damaged or missing, it can affect more than just your smile. It can make eating difficult and even impact your confidence. Fortunately, dental crowns and bridges offer effective solutions to restore the look and function of your teeth. These dental restorations are designed to look and feel like your natural teeth, helping you regain a healthy, complete smile. Let's explore what dental crowns and bridges are and how they can help.
Making impressions is a critical early step in fabricating any dental prosthesis. The use of an intraoral scanner or conventional impression trays with splinted implant impression components to capture edentulous ridge contours and 3-dimensional implant positions and relationships is a complex, technique-sensitive clinical process. Research to date has failed to provide a consensus on the best methods. To assist clinicians in this challenging area, this issue of Prosthodontics Newsletter reviews recent professional literature on edentulous implant impression techniques and their accuracy.
Despite astonishing advances in dental digital processes, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, the fabrication of dental prostheses continues to be driven essentially by indirect methods. Thus, a replica of the intraoral geography generated from traditional or digital impression-making remains necessary. Keeping up with innovations in methods, materials, equipment, clinical techniques and research reports permits the informed practitioner to optimize the impression process, thus improving prosthesis outcomes. This issue of Prosthodontics Newsletter discusses various factors that have an impact on the quality of intraoral contour capture in the fabrication of implant prostheses for partially edentulous patients.
Managed inappropriately, conventional removable partial denture (RPD) therapy can cause hard and soft tissue damage secondary to prosthesis rotation under functional/parafunctional loading. When RPDs do not rotate under function (Kennedy class III), RPD durability is significantly improved. One way to counteract RPD rotation incorporates dental implants, with or without attachments, in the denture foundation before or after prosthesis fabrication. This issue of Prosthodontics Newsletter looks at factors involved in successfully applying dental implants to improve the support, stability and retention of implant-assisted RPDs.
The severely atrophic edentulous mandible presents significant rehabilitative challenges. Typically, the condition is preceded by the patient’s maladaptation to a conventional complete denture, generally related to poor prosthesis retention and stability caused by a compromised denture foundation. Unfortunately, the same compromised soft and hard tissue foundation complicates dental implant therapy as well. This issue of Prosthodontics Newsletter looks at modern considerations for implant rehabilitation of the severely atrophic edentulous mandible, helping the practitioner to remain current in recent trends for treatment planning and patient management.
Successful restoration for severely atrophic maxillary edentulous patients is one of the most complex rehabilitations in dentistry. Obstacles often include the lack of residual bone volume, the need for advanced surgical maneuvers to improve bone volume, and the high cost of therapeutic solutions. Dentists need to know about the existence of these complex treatments to inform their patients about treatment options. This issue of Prosthodontics Newsletter focuses on critical considerations involved in implant rehabilitation of the severely atrophic maxilla, from surgical interventions to restorative considerations to patient satisfaction with outcomes.
The dental prostheses offered to edentulous and partially edentulous patients often reflect personal preferences rather than diagnostic factors that can lead to improved quality of life. Conventional vs implant-assisted and fixed vs removable prosthodontic therapies present advantages and disadvantages that vary broadly based on a patient’s preexisting conditions. Evidence-based decision-making is key to successful, durable and appropriate prosthodontic treatment planning for these patients. This issue of Prosthodontics Newsletter focuses on prosthodontics treatment related to our patients’ ongoing quality of life.
Using 2 anteriorly positioned dental implants to support, retain and stabilize an overdenture is a desirable, perhaps even the preferred, method to restore the edentulous mandible. Indeed, improving the diminishing prosthodontic foundation with implants facilitates mastication, phonation, esthetics, comfort and overall quality of life. Mechanical retention of these prostheses can be improved by various commercially available and laboratory-manufactured attachment systems, generally categorized as either “stud” or “bar” attachments. This issue of Prosthodontics Newsletter looks at clinical studies that compare various attachment systems to determine if any one attachment system is superior to the rest.
Management of edentulous patients with implant restorations can have a dramatic impact on the esthetic appearance of the dentofacial complex. Failure to visualize the intended result during diagnosis often renders definitive restorations inadequate structurally, functionally and esthetically. Appreciating factors that influence the esthetics of full-arch implant-supported restorations will permit their diagnostic consideration before therapy onset rather than after prosthesis placement, when it may be too late to make needed changes. In this issue of Prosthodontics Newsletter, we present a few esthetic considerations affecting the outcomes of these complicated restorations.
Although single-tooth implants have excellent survival rates, their survival is frequently accompanied by a loss of peri-implant marginal bone. Immediate implantation accompanied by restoration in the extraction socket may reduce soft and hard tissue recession of the alveolar ridge, thereby minimizing initial bone remodeling. While depth of bone support and peri-implant soft tissue are key factors in the health and function of implants, integrating peri-implant soft tissue is essential for restorations in the esthetic zone.
