Design of Complete Dentures by Adopting CAD Developed for Fixed Prostheses.

The demand for complete dentures is expected to increase worldwide, but complete dentures are mainly designed and fabricated manually involving a broad series of clinical and laboratory procedures. Therefore, the quality of complete dentures largely depends on the skills of the dentist and technician, leading to difficulty in quality control. Computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) has been used to design and fabricate various dental restorations including dental inlays, veneers, crowns, partial crowns, and fixed partial dentures (FPDs). It has been envisioned that the application of CAD/CAM technology could reduce intensive clinical/laboratory work for the fabrication of complete dentures; however, CAD/CAM is seldom used to fabricate complete dentures due to the lack of suitable CAD software to design virtual complete dentures although the CAM techniques are in a much advanced stage. Here we report the successful design of virtual complete dentures using CAD software of 3Shape Dental System 2012, which was developed for designing fixed prostheses instead of complete dentures. Our results demonstrated that complete dentures could be successfully designed by the combination of two modeling processes, single coping and full anatomical FPD, available in the 3Shape Dental System 2012.

Oral rehabilitation of a Parkinson's patient: A case report.

Parkinson's disease is an idiopathic disorder of the central nervous system, characterized by resting tremors, muscular rigidity, slow and decreased movements. Oral rehabilitation of these patients requires special care, especially in those cases where the patient's socioeconomic status is not good and patient cannot come several times for fabrication of a complete denture. This clinical report presents a case of a Parkinson's patient who was completely rehabilitated in 3 appointments using special techniques. Border molding, final impression and jaw relation procedures were done in one appointment by using a custom tray with detachable handles and occlusal rims.