Avaliação clínica e perceptiva de pacientes portadores de próteses implantorretidas

Abstract

A detailed and careful planning, in Dental Implantology, is important to achieve the functional and esthetic objectives to rehabilitate completely edentulous patients. This study objectives were: (1) to verify which type of implant-supported prosthetic rehabilitation, overdenture or fixed prostheses (protocol), reestablishes in an effective way the comfort of lower arch completely edentulous patients; (2) to identify the advantages and disadvantages of these rehabilitations using data obtained with questionnaires and clinical examination. An observational clinical study was performed with lower arch completely edentulous patients treated with either overdenture or protocol implant-supported prostheses, obtained from a convenience sample from the South of Brazil. The study sample was composed by 28 volunteers, in agreement with the study inclusion and exclusion criteria, half were rehabilitated with overdenture and half with protocol. A clinical evaluation was performed to obtain the plaque and bleeding on probing indexes and verify the presence of mucositis. Further, the volunteers were subjected to three questionnaires to quantify the satisfaction level with their prosthetic treatment through objective answers and the visual analogical scale. Results were analyzed by Mann-Whitney test (=0.05). All treatments were considered satisfactory from the mastication abil ity point of view. However, statistical differences found for all questionnaires showed that the protocol group had a higher level of satisfaction compared to the overdenture group (p0.05). On the other hand, the plaque and bleeding on probing indexes were statistically higher for the protocol group. Thus, it was concluded that both rehabilitation modalities increased the satisfaction and life quality of edentulous patients. Yet, although patients rehabilitated with protocol had a higher level of satisfaction, they also showed higher plaque and bleeding on probing indexes.