Your denture will be more and more susceptible to cracking and breakage with age, and even if you follow your dentist’s advice with regards to cleaning and storing your dentures the plastic will become weaker. This is because as you age your mouth changes shape and this causes your denture to have a looser fit – ie the plates will move about more in your mouth as you are talking or chewing food.
This means that the plastic is repeatedly flexed where the suction is trying to keep it in your mouth. As with any flexible plastic, repeated flexing of the same part will cause breakage. There is also a risk that repeated flexing of the acrylic can cause the false teeth embedded in the plate to become loose or even break off. This can be prevented by having your denture relined when it gets loose.
If your denture breaks and you come to see us to get it repaired, we will not simply glue the pieces back together. Gluing the pieces may be one step of the process but only if there is one clear line where the denture has fractured (ie not lots of cracks or a shatter) and even then glue is only used to temporarily attach the pieces together to hold them in place for the repairing procedure.
Once the pieces are in place our laboratory technician will pour either a silicone compound or a plaster mix inside the denture to cast a mold of the original shape. The final step is for our technician to remove a thin slice from the plastic on either side of the crack and replace it with new acrylic. This means that your denture is actually stronger after it has been mended than when it was before it broke!
The denture is remade to exactly the same specification and measurements except the acrylic plate is stronger. If one of the false teeth has come loose from the plate the same procedure is followed where the old plastic is removed from around the damaged are and replaced with new acrylic, making the bond stronger than ever.
Do not Repair your Dentures yourself
You should not try and repair your dentures yourself unless you are sure you are doing it correctly or you could cost yourself even more money to repair it. If you are trying to fix it however you must never use glue to hold the pieces together. Glues contain powerful solvents and these solvents melt the acrylic around the edges of the breakage and if you do repair with glue the glue can distort the shape of your denture.
If the glue melts the edges of your plate there is no way for your denture to be repaired, even by a dental laboratory, back to the same shape or condition it was in before the breakage. A distorted denture will be ill-fitting and is more likely to cause blisters and sores. You will most likely need to have a new plate made which can be costly and take a long time. Super Glue, which is the only glue that won’t melt the plastic, is unfortunately water soluble to even using this will only give you a temporary solution.
It is also difficult for a non-professional to place the pieces back together so that they are exactly the same size and shape as they were before the break, which again could cause sores and blisters.
If your denture has broken because it does not fit you properly (either due to a change in the shape of your mouth or due to poor craftsmanship) you will not be able to simply have the pieces reattached. This is because if they are attached to repair the denture to its previous measurements the same problems will still be there and your dentures will break again. If you pay to have your denture relined or re based when the break is due to bad fit you may pay less in the long run than having it repaired to the wrong size.