In reconstructing missing teeth and surrounding soft tissue with natural looking manner, not only the “white esthetic factors (in another words artificial teeth)”, but also “pink esthetic factors (in another words denture base)” are very important even for edentulous patients. For improving pink esthetic factor, the denture base characterization is one of effective techniques for more real and highly individualized prosthesis than conventional pink colored denture. However, there are few researches about patient’s demand for denture and denture gum esthetics. The aim of this study is to investigate patient’s needs for denture esthetics and denture base characterization.
Method:
The study participants were removable denture wearers sourced from the outpatient roster of the Osaka University Dental Clinic. The questionnaire was consisted 3 questions as follows: 1.Do you care about denture appearance? 2.Do you care about denture gum appearance? (Options were care very much, care and not care.) 3.Do you want to apply denture base characterization? Options were necessary or unnecessary. We also used Visual Analog Scale (VAS) as evaluation for each question.
Result:
Total number of 73 (31 men and 42 women) outpatients whose mean age was 72.8 years participated this survey. There are 74% of all the participants care about denture appearance (care very much: 56%, care: 18%). And over 50% of all the participants care about denture gum appearance (care very much: 41%, care: 14%). 75% participants want to apply denture base characterization. From the statistical analysis, female and under 75years old participants care much about denture appearance significantly.
Conclusion:
Many patients care about denture appearance, and they also want to apply gingival characterization. The needs of denture base characterization are not small, especially among female and under 75years old patients.