Abstract
Excessive occlusal forces can lead to damaged teeth, fractured dental restorations, implant complications, and untoward patient responses following prosthetic treatment. Whether designing and building a prosthetic case with analog or digital methods, problems at insertion and sometimes soon after the patient uses their new prosthesis, are quite common in daily dental practice. The implementation of relative occlusal force data and occlusal contact timing sequence durations, can aid a dentist in controlling excessive occlusal forces and time–premature contacts, that often create post-insertion occlusal complications. This presentation will illustrate how utilizing the T-Scan 10 technology can reduce unwanted post-insertion patient occlusal adjustment visits, while helping dentists successfully manage destructive occlusal forces that wear and fracture teeth and implant prosthetic components, and often compromise peri-implant bone levels.
Learning Objectives
- Explain how to control prosthetic case complications by employing the T-Scan with full arch implant prostheses, mixed arches where teeth and implant prostheses reside together, and snap-on removable implant prostheses
- Demonstrate how a digital occlusal analysis can readily detect damaging high force and time premature occlusal contacts, that cause post insertion implant component breakage, patient occlusal pain, and restorative material instability
- Demonstrate how to use T-Scan data to install new restorations with precise occlusal force balance, and a low-force preservational occlusal force profile
- Explain that traditional, non-digital occlusal indicators do not accurately describe occlusal contact forces and timing and that subjectively choosing contacts for adjustment based upon their size, shape, or color, has been shown in multiple published studies to be highly inaccurate. This subjective aspect of occlusal treatment is what leads directly post-insertion complications.
