Management of the flabby ridge: using contemporary materials to solve an old problem

The presence of displaceable denture-bearing tissues often presents a difficulty when making complete dentures. Unless managed appropriately, such 'flabby ridges' adversely affect the support, retention and stability of complete dentures. Many impression techniques have been proposed to help overcome this difficulty. While these vary in approach, they are similar in their complexity, are often quite time-consuming to perform, and rely on materials not commonly in use in contemporary general dental practice. The purpose of this paper is to describe an impression technique for flabby ridges that makes use of polyvinylsiloxane impression dental materials routinely available in general dental practice.