THE EFFECT OF CANTILEVERS ON THE STRESS DISTRIBUTION OF THREE IMPLANTS SUPPORTING MANDIBULAR OVERDENTURES

Implant therapy is widely used for the treatment of edentulous patients. Placing implants to the interforaminal region of an edentulous mandible and constructing overdenture prosthesses is a good alternative. However, there is no consensus on the number of the implants and whether or not using distal extensions. For that reason in our study, we tried to find out the effect of implant retained overdenture prosthesses with or without distal extensions on the stress distribution at the implant interface. In our study we prepared two, three dimentional finite element models representing bar retained overdenture prostheses with 7mm distal extensions and no distal extensions built over 3 implants. 25 N horizontal, 100 N vertical and 103 N oblique force were aplied each model. The stresses were investigated using the ANSYS 8.1 workbench programme. The results of our study show that the maximum stress formations were seen on the cortical bone distal to the implant which is nearest to the side where the forces were applied.