Background. The problem of providing high-quality dental care to edentulous patients remains one of the most important and unresolved to this day in the clinic of prosthodontics. The causes of complete loss of teeth can be both periodontal tissue diseases and diseases of hard tooth tissues of carious and non-carious origin, trauma and the like. It becomes necessary to fabricate complete removable dentures to prevent the occurrence of pathologies in such situations. Complete secondary adentia leads to a large number of local and general complications. The chewing apparatus undergoes a number of functional and morphological changes. Therefore, the complete absence of teeth sets the dentist the task of restoring the functions of full chewing, the appearance of the patient, and speech. The complexity of high-quality prosthetics for edentulous patients is also because the clinical characteristics of supporting tissues are diverse, constantly changing, so a personal approach to creating stable denture is needed. It should be added that the fabrication of high-quality complete removable dentures largely depends on the properties of the base material. The main group of materials for the fabrication of such dentures is acrylic plastics.
The aim. The work is focused on the study of the functional state of the masticatory muscles and the restoration of masticatory effectiveness in edentulous patients, for whom dentures were made in the prosthodontics clinic from the acrylic base material «Ftorax».
Material and methods. Hot curing plastic based on fluorine-containing acrylic copolymers «Ftorax» was used in the work. Our evaluation of the quality of all constructions was carried out using the «BOFSAS» test, determining the biopotentials of the masticatory muscles using electromyography, and determining the masticatory effectiveness according to I.S. Rubinov.
Results. Based on our work, it can be noted that the use of the basic acrylic material «Ftorax» allows us to achieve good fixation and stabilization of complete removable dentures, which is subjectively confirmed by the «BOFSAS» test, objectively – by the electromyographic studies and time indices during chewing test according to I.S. Rubinov.
The amplitude during volitional compression is 556.90±8.72 μV, which approaches the norm (641.58±10.01 μV), and almost four times higher than before prosthetics (188.11±8,13 μV) after 1 year of constructions using. A similar pattern is observed with arbitrary chewing: the amplitude (547.32±8.43 μV) approaches normal (643.92±9.11 μV) compared with the results before prosthetics (201.40±9.39 μV). As for the coefficient «K», its value decreased almost twofold compared with the results before prosthetics (2.44±0.14) and equals to 1.25±0.03, which is significantly closer to normal (1,02±0.01).
After the test by Rubinov the following results were obtained: the average time that patients with intact dentitions spent chewing on the stimulus was approximately 12.97±0.13 seconds and the average time for patients before prosthetics (with old dentures) was approximately 45.16±0,41 sec.
The time that patients spent chewing a nut after 1 month was 28.97±0.42 seconds, after 6 months – 26.94±0.44 seconds, and after 1 year of using the entures – 25.48±0.45 sec.
Based on this, it can be summarized that adaptation to such dentures takes place at the appropriate time with minor corrections.
Conclusion. The results of our clinical study indicate the feasibility of using «Ftorax» in prosthodontics clinic for treatment of edentulous patients.