Ovate pontic design is a valuable resource when considering how to successfully replace missing teeth. Their popularity has grown over the decades in the world of crown and bridge dentistry. Read on to learn how you can leverage their advantages in your dental practice …

Why You Should Use Ovate Pontic Design

Ovate, ‘egg-shaped,’ pontics provide many aesthetic advantages that make them an obvious choice for certain cases. They enable you to create a concave tissue profile, as well as the illusion of an emergence profile when using a convex pontic. Their ideal design ensures they can be passive against tissue.

When treatment planning ovate pontics, you have to consider the larger contact area that is necessary with the tissue. Ensuring amazing gingival aesthetics also depends on using light pressure to form the tissue and papilla.

Additionally, there must be enough tissue thickness and ridge width. In some situations, you may find that surgical augmentation is needed to achieve this. Patients tend to accept the possibility of surgical augmentation quite well so long as they understand the full aesthetic implications.

The Ideal Ovate Pontic Design Technique

A significant benefit of ovate pontics is that when you create the site yourself, you can use the provisional restoration to guide the tissue maturation. This gives you an increased level of control over aesthetics that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Just like with implants, you can have a hand in papilla form and height, not to mention labial gingival position.

Ideal dimensions include a 1 mm base of tissue beneath the provisional and over the ridge. Take care not to limit your ability to alter the tissue profile. This could occur if there is less depth after having the base of the point 3mm from the free gingival margin on the labial. The best practice is to anesthetize your patient, then sound to bone over the site. You can learn if tissue thickness is where it needs to be.

Now, you can transition to creating the pontic site. Great materials for this are a rough diamond and a high speed handpiece. Choose your tools based on the quality that will enable you to decrease discomfort for your patient. Take an impression of the ovate pontic site, prepare it on a model, and indirectly fabricate the provisional. Alternately, you could add to an existing temporary.

Finally, remove the tissue for the pontic while the provisional is in hand, reseating it and continuing to remove until there is no blanching. You can cement and wait to take final impressions until a few months of healing have gone by.