Analysis of Retention Factors in Milled & Conventional Dentures

Several materials have been used over the years for the fabrication of removable complete dentures (CD). Bone, wood, ivory, porcelain, metals and polymers have been utilized for the fabrication of CDs with Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) being the most widely used.The advancement in dental material technology led to the improvement in the fabrication method of PMMA denture bases. Various methods are available for the fabrication of PMMA CD bases using heat, auto, light, microwave polymerization, rapid prototyping or computer numeric control (CNC) milling.Denture base adaptation can be influenced by the amount of polymerization shrinkage that occurs during the processing method of fabrication. CAD/CAM dentures milled from prepolymerized PMMA acrylic resin blocks theoretically have reduced or no polymerization shrinkage. There have been no clinical studies, to date, that have compared retention values between milled and conventionally processed denture bases. CAD/CAM milled denture base (AvaDent). Each denture base was subjected to a vertical pulling force three times at 10-minute intervals.