Prosthetic rehabilitation in a case of mandibulectomy with discontinuity defect. Case report

Prosthetic rehabilitation of the mandible in patients who have undergone ostectomy to treat neoplasia, poses a number of special challenges. Most of these arise from the fact that the stump (remaining part) tends to deviate towards the operated side, resulting in discontinuity defects, chewing and speaking difficulties, soft tissue dysfunction in the stomatognathic system and facial asymmetry. In modern surgical oncology, the part of the mandible where the resection is made, is usually reconstructed with an autograft or allograft, thus preventing the stump to deviate. Yet there are prosthetic difficulties, related to the type of transplant used. However, there are cases in which mandibular discontinuity defects are, for various reasons, not reconstructed. Although such cases are nowadays rare, they still never occur in clinical practice. The aim of this paper is to present the prosthetic rehabilitation of a patient with mandibular discontinuity and edentulousness after an operation to remove a neoplasm, which had not been followed by a surgical correction of the discontinuity defect.