A clinical round table about the treatment of the severely resorbed posterior mandible. Part 1: challenges, endeavor and perspectives

Abstract

Implant dentistry evolved and improved very quickly during the last 15 years, and the Frontier of the rehabilitation strategies is each year pushed further. However, there is one very common clinical situation that remains quite complex to treat even for the experienced clinicians: the severely resorbed posterior mandible. After teeth extraction, the centrifuge resorption of the alveolar bone is quite quick and it remains only a dense cortical bone. The presence of anatomical obstacles -mostly the mandibular inferior nerve -and the general shape and orientation of the residual bone mandibular body, often compromise a functional and stable implantation in this area after natural resorption. The problem is often solved in full arch mandibular rehabilitation through the use of implants in the anterior region and a prosthetic cantilever to rehabilitate the posterior area, but this approach is not possible when the patients still have healthy anterior mandibular teeth and only need posterior rehabilitations. The use of short implants gives excellent result in moderately resorbed posterior mandibular ridges [1], but resorption can very quickly reach the limits of what short implants can do. If a bone reconstruction is required, this mandibular cortical bone is dense and often not well vascularized, what makes difficult to regenerate some bone chamber or to graft a material on the mandible body. Moreover, the specific dynamic of the mandible body implies many constraints both intrinsic and extrinsic on the posterior bone body, what are supplementary sources of interferences with a potential bone regenerative therapeutic strategy

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