Introduction

Complete dentures are the most common treatment for total loss of teeth in a dental arch.  Although the prevalence of total tooth loss continues to decline among adults in the United States, population shifts have resulted in a sustained --even slightly increasing-- demand for complete dentures.¹  Despite the fact that dentists are able to offer their patients an impressive array of services for preserving, restoring, and enhancing the natural dentition, there continues to be a widespread need for oral health professionals to provide excellent complete denture services.  An essential component of complete denture service is patient education about denture hygiene.

Preservation of some or much of the dentition into later adulthood has become increasingly common in industrialized nations in the second half of the Twentieth Century.²  Tooth loss in any adult population is highly likely to increase as the population ages, because the factors that lead to the loss of teeth--dental caries, loss of periodontal support, a history of dentoalveolar trauma, a history of dental care--are additive over time.  For this reason, rates of complete tooth loss are customarily highest in the oldest age groups.  For example, over 70% of edentulous persons in the United States are over age 65.³  Yet the degree of increasing tooth loss with advancing age is declining.  In the United States, over two-thirds of adults over age seventy-five were fully edentulous in 1957, but by 1993, fewer than 40% of Americans in New England over age 75 years had lost all of their teeth.⁴

The Twentieth Century has also seen unprecedented shifts in the age distribution of the populations of industrialized nations.  In the United States, approximately 3% of the population (about 3 million people) were over the age of 65 years in 1900.  One hundred years later, over 13% of the population--more than 37 million Americans--have already celebrated their 65th birthdays.⁵  This trend is most notable in the segment of the population over age 85, which has increased by a factor of more than 22 since the turn of the century, to nearly 4 million individuals today.  The dramatic growth of the proportion of the population living into the seventh, eighth, and ninth decades and beyond has coupled with the age-correlated nature of tooth loss.  The result is a continued growth in the number of older persons requiring replacement dentitions, even as the proportion of older people requiring dentures has declined.⁶  This trend has been predicted to continue into the coming decade.¹

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