Although you're undoubtedly aware that your dental health has declined, it might be a surprise to be told that you need full arch rehabilitation. Your arches are simply the oral ridges (bone covered with gingival tissue) that hold your teeth. Full arch rehabilitation in dentistry is when an entire upper or lower dental arch features missing or deteriorated teeth to the point that the arch is, for all intents and purposes, nonfunctional.

Rehabilitation

The dental arch in question must be rehabilitated back to its former full range of capabilities. This can be achieved using a variety of different treatments, but replacing all teeth with a denture supported by dental implants is an increasingly common choice.

Existing Teeth

You might already be wondering why the teeth still anchored in your dental arch can't just be repaired. Depending on the nature of their decay, restoration might not be a straightforward solution. Even when it might be possible to rebuild a tooth using dental acrylic and then reinforce the tooth with a dental crown, this can be costly and time-consuming when multiple teeth need this type of treatment. 

Missing Teeth

There's also the matter of your missing teeth, which could be replaced with a dental bridge supported by natural teeth, or more ideally with dental implants. Single-tooth implants are different from implant-supported dentures. Replacing multiple missing teeth with individual implants can be too demanding a process.

Replacing an Entire Dental Arch

From a dentist's point of view, it's often in the patient's best interests to extract deteriorated teeth and then use an implant-supported denture to replace the entire arch of teeth. This is a point of view that you're likely to share. Individual treatments performed bit-by-bit over the course of several months (if not longer) are going to be a fairly intensive process, as well as an expensive one. With implant-supported dentures, the entire dental arch is restored in a single process. What does this process involve?

Four Implants

In many cases, only four dental implants are needed to secure the denture, which can be attached very shortly after surgery. Because these are not single-tooth implants (an individual implant for an individual prosthetic tooth), your dentist has some flexibility with the exact location and angle of the implant, allowing them to be placed where your jawbone has the most density, which aids the healing process and results in the most secure dental prosthesis. Once attached, the denture is permanent, and you simply brush it while it remains in your mouth.

An implant-supported denture is often the most straightforward and least intensive solution when full arch rehabilitation has become unavoidable.

For more information about full arch rehabilitation, contact a local dental office.