Copying Is Not Cheating: The Use of Copy Dentures In The Digital Denture Process

ABSTRACT

Dental practitioners often encounter patients who want to replace an old pair of complete dentures. There are many factors and inherent challenges involved in providing a new pair of dentures which are not only technically and clinically acceptable, but also acceptable to the patient. These challenges can prove to be particularly difficult, when the replacement denture is for an elderly patient, or patients with systemic disorders such as Parkinson's, Dementia, Alzheimer's or the physically frail. Previous denture use enables a patient to adapt more quickly to a new set of dentures, as compared with a patient who has never worn dentures before. However, when patients are wearing old and inadequate prosthesis over long periods, the necessary muscular control develops, which enables them to still function. Therefore, the difficulty arises if major changes are made in the new denture, and a lot of muscular adaptation is required for control. In these cases, the advantage of a copy dentures would be the ease with which neuromuscular adaption to the new dentures can occur. (Vohra and Habib 2013) The method described in this poster used materials readily available in a private practice to generate a pair of duplicate dentures which captured all of the features of the patients existing pair. These were modified chair-side and used to capture vital information on fit, occlusion and aesthetics, forming a template which was transferred to the laboratory and used to generate new dentures via the traditional laboratory process. The same template was also used to generate a pair of "AVADENT Digital Dentures" for comparison.