The development of wax cubes hardness for chewing ability evaluation

Abstract

To develop wax cube hardness for chewing ability evaluation in total edentulous patient with complete denture by the practical process in Thailand and to find the suitable hardness that those patients have chewing ability close to normal dentitions. Three formulations of wax cube; hard, original and soft, were developed by different mixture ratio of bees wax and microcrystalline wax. Hardness of three types of wax cube and sixteen common foods were obtained from Universal Testing Machine. 20 normal dentition (mean age 27.85±1.42 years), 20 complete denture wearer subjects (mean age 70.55±9.14 years) and 20 implant-retained lower complete denture (mean age 67.70±6.68 years) were selected. Each subject was assigned to chew three pieces of each hardness of wax cube, one cube by another for 10 chewing strokes under habitually chewing patterns. The chewed wax was captured and analyzed by the Image J program ,which calculated the percentage of well mixed color areas. Statistically analysis revealed a significant difference (P < .05) in percentage of chewing ability between two groups with only original and soft wax cubes. Complete Denture group had reduced about 35 percent for chewing original and soft wax cubes when compare to normal dentition group. Implant-retained lower complete denture group showed the higher percentage of chewing ability than complete denture group. From the study, it can be concluded that the suitable hardness chewing ability evaluation in total edentulous patient with complete denture are the original and soft wax cubes and these are in the same range as common food selected. Our results suggested that the wax cube is the one option for screening chewing ability accompanied by some nutritional assessment tools to evaluate nutritional status in the elderly patients.