Biomechanical dental implants comparison by means of numerical models and nuclear medicine

A review of recent literature revealed very high success rate of implants used to support a mandibular overdenture as an alternative to the conventional removable dentistry. Today there are already several prosthetic solutions for same clinical situations: in particular, the implant support can be different depending on the type of implants used and their layout. It is well known that the success or the failure of implan s interfaced with bone depends, counting on a favourable biological reaction, on the structural condition of the biomechanical system constituted by the bone structure and the implant. The knowledge of strain/stress pattern can allow to establish if bone maintenance, resorption or addition is more likely to take place. In this work two different kinds of implant supports for overdenture retention were compared by means of FEM: they differed for the number of implants, for their dimension, for their location inside the mandible and, at last, for the presence/absence of a beam connecting all implants and making them all linked. Clinical follow-up was assessed by means of technetium 99m-MDP scintigraphy. The obtained results agree with the clinical experience.