There has been an increase in the incidence of complete edentulism among the elder patients. Complete dentures are the most common and preferred treatment of choice. Complete dentures help in masticatory function and restore the facial shape of the edentulous patients. Fabrication of the complete dentures is, therefore, a very important task for the clinician to ensure patient satisfaction. Errors may occur during the denture fabrication and these are called processing errors. It is a multifactorial process. The aim of the survey is to study the errors that occur during processing of a complete denture. It is a questionnaire based study conducted with a batch of 100 dental students. The questionnaire consisted of 16 questions focused on different fabrication techniques, timing, materials used, etc. by various students. The data collected was represented statistically and discussed. Dough technique was the most preferred method adopted by 39% of the students. Shorter curing cycles produced less defects, but majority of the students used longer cycles (41%). Most of them reported fractures (16%) and microporosities (11%) as defects. We can conclude that there are a few areas of error during the processing of dentures by the dental students. The incidence of these errors, however appears to be low. There is a scope for CAD/CAM complete dentures in the future to eliminate the possibilities of errors.
Design and fabrication of complete dentures using CAD/CAM technology