If you are considering partial dentures or dental implants to replace one or more missing teeth, you may have heard the term abutment and wondered what that meant. This article describes what an abutment is and how it functions both in and outside of dentistry.
What is an abutment?
An abutment is a type of structural support positioned at the weight-bearing ends of an otherwise freestanding structure. Bridges, for example, are structures that require abutments to safely buttress the massive amounts of weight and pressure that come to bear against them. Similar structures that require abutments are dams and arches. It is the support that they provide that allows these structures to operate as designed, even though they appear to be free-standing.
While abutments are usually man-made structures, built with the express purpose of supporting a structure such as a bridge, dam, or arch, they can often be naturally existing. The abutments that utilized by dams, for example, are sometimes already present in the form of a valley or gorge into which the dam can be built; while this requires modification of that existing natural feature, utilizing these existing natural structures allows for a more seamless integration into the natural landscape.
While there are a wide variety of kinds of abutments in the engineering world, including gravity abutment, counterfort abutment, and spill-through abutment, all of these structures have one important thing in common – they exist and operate to offer support to the structures they hold up. Without them, important structures like bridges and arches simply wouldn’t be possible.
Dental abutment
While your mouth is not composed of valleys and gorges and your dentist isn’t exactly building a bridge or dam inside of it, abutments are an integral part of creating functional dental implants, as well. Like the abutments that engineers use to shore up support for the structures that they create, your dentist must also create support systems for the dental appliances that they engineer to stand in for teeth and roots, for example.
When installing a dental implant or partial denture, your dentist needs something that will support the new tooth or teeth that she or he has created for you. Much like the existing natural structures – the valleys and gorges – that an engineer sometimes uses to shore up support for a new man-made structure like a bridge, dentists often take advantage of the existing natural structures that can offer support in your mouth – in this case, your teeth. This is often a foundational aspect of anchoring a new partial denture, for example. Oftentimes your existing teeth work in tandem with a carefully designed full support system that works together to hold the new denture in place, which might include rest seats and guide planes, as well.
In the case of dental implants, however, your dentist will likely opt for a newly created abutment or support system for your new tooth. This consists of an implant screw that is anchored into the jawbone and a ceramic abutment piece that on which the new tooth rests.
Just as in the case of the carefully designed bridges and dams that seem to float in air, your new teeth will look as natural and effortless as the others, all the while being safely and carefully supported so that they last for years to come.