What Are Overdentures And What Patients Make Good Candidates For The Treatment?

Narrowing down the best dental replacement option often starts at how many missing teeth you need to replace. Once you move past three or four missing teeth, individual dental implants become less practical and overly expensive. But you can still achieve some of the stability and the natural appearance of dental implants if you choose partial or full overdentures, which combine the jawbone-implanted metal roots of dental implants and a plate of artificial dental crowns that snap onto the roots.

What patients are the best candidates for overdentures? You should always discuss the details with your cosmetic dentistry specialist or family dentist, but here are a few general guidelines.

Patient Has Numerous Missing Teeth But Has Strong Bone Support

Overdentures require that you have a number of missing teeth in one area of the mouth, which would make you a candidate for partial overdentures, or a full mouth of missing teeth in need of replacement. But you also need to have strong, dense jawbone in the areas where the teeth are missing in order to properly support the dental implant roots.

The combination of missing teeth and healthy jawbone is harder to find than you might imagine. The loss of a natural tooth removes the natural friction the roots provided that kept the jawbone thriving and healthy. Jawbone health can quickly deteriorate once you lose your teeth.

If you schedule the overdenture procedure to start right after your teeth extraction, you might be one of the few who easily qualify for the implants. Your dentist will drill holes in strategic locations to insert the dental roots that will hold the denture plate. You will then undergo a healing period during which your jawbone will naturally heal around the roots to hold the roots in place. A post is then attached to the top of the roots, and then the dentures snap onto that post.

Patient Has Minimal Bone Support But Is Willing to Undergo Graft

Do you have the right arrangement of missing teeth for overdentures but you have one or two areas of weak jawbone? Your dentist might be able to perform a bone graft procedure to make you a candidate for overdentures.

Bone grafts involve the dentist taking a sample of healthier bone, either from elsewhere in your mouth or from an outside donor, and using that bone to build up areas of weakness. The donor bone spliced into the weak bone will fuse together after a healing process and provide an adequate base for your dental implant roots for the overdentures.

Note that going this route will make your treatment time longer since you will have to wait out bone healing in two different stages. For more information, talk to your dentist.

Share