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"Prosthetic condition" and patients' judgment of complete dentures
C de Baat1, A A van Aken, J Mulder
1Unit of Oral Function and Prosthetic Dentistry, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Purpose:
This study introduces the concept "prosthetic condition", which combines the quality of complete dentures and residual alveolar ridges.
Material And Methods:
A pilot study was performed to select quality criteria with an acceptable interobserver agreement. With these criteria, a clinical examination was performed to assess the quality of the existing complete dentures and the residual alveolar ridges of 397 complete denture wearers. During clinical examination, the interobserver agreement of the selected criteria was retested. The "prosthetic condition" was assessed by combining the scores for denture quality and quality of the residual alveolar ridges. Subsequently, participants' satisfaction with and complaints about their dentures were scored according to their answers to specific questions.
Results:
Logistic regression analysis demonstrated that no variable of the "prosthetic condition" proved to explain the denture satisfaction. Some variables of the "prosthetic condition" had a significant but not relevant correlation with some denture complaints.
Conclusions:
More research is necessary to substantiate the concept "prosthetic condition" as an acceptable measure of professionally quality assessment of dentures and denture-bearing surfaces. However, in determining the treatment need of community-dwelling groups, this concept seems a more realistic measure than denture quality only.