Abstract
A dental implant may be used in prosthetic teeth reconstruction in cleft patients. There are three main indications for this approach: substitution of a missing single tooth, an abutment for the framework, and an abutment for a fixed dental prosthesis (we designate it as type I, II, and III).
A clinical report about prosthetic rehabilitation using dental implants instead of a fixed or removable partial prosthesis is presented. A patient with a unilateral cleft defect was cured at the University Hospital in Prague, Czech Republic.
Together with a missing lateral incisor, the fault was associated with agenesis of the two upper canines and the three second premolars. The treatment was completed by prosthetic dental reconstruction using the framework with a dental implant as an abutment.
This approach allowed minimizing the adjacent teeth preparation to a single tooth as the second abutment. If a classical fixed prosthodontics had been performed, the preparation would have involved a larger group of intact teeth with the risk of their viability loss.
The procedure passed without complications. The outcome was highly professional and brought satisfaction to the patient.