The Apple Scale - an objective method with biting a whole Apple to evaluate the chewing function and patient satisfaction of complete denture and implant overdenture wearers

Abstract

In recent years, the importance of oral function management corresponding to the life stage is increasing. The reduction of masticatory function due to tooth loss, especially the problem o‘f difficulty in eating’ of edentulous patient is serious. In response to such problems, dental prosthesis treatment (denture prosthesis) is generally responsible for recovery of oral function, especially masticatory function, and it is generally said that dentistry plays a major role among many occupations that are responsible for it. Generally, the restore of the masticatory function of edentulous patients is mainly based on denture prosthetic treatment. Evaluation to know the extent and aspect of functional restoration with denture treatment so far has placed weight on chewing‘ efficiency’ and it was difficult to evaluate masticatory‘ function’. Many methods have been proposed to evaluate oral function subjectively and objectively, however, preparation of special equipment/ instruments and food is necessary, it takes time to evaluation, etc. It is difficult to carry out easily. It is also not suitable for evaluating masticatory function by denture treatment. Furthermore, the complete denture is a removable prosthetic appliance, and it is desired to establish an evaluation method considering the function of the denture from a viewpoint different from the fixed prosthesis. We conducted evaluations of the duration and degree of satisfaction of dentures with an emphasis on‘ assessment of instability’ in dental treatment all at the site of daily practice and evaluation of mastication using test foods to ge‘t stable mastication’. In this article, we integrated the function evaluation method and the masticatory function evaluation method of these dentures and organized it as‘ The Apple Scale’ newly, so we reported about the outline and tried to apply it to evaluate the treatment result of the wearer of the implant overdenture.