Sammanfattning
Oral health related quality of life, as part of the general concept quality of life, is an expression of a person’s experience of and coping with life, but limited to aspects of oral health. The concept means different things to different people and is thus difficult to define, measure and interpret unambiguously, and the measurements are only meaningful at a group level. Nevertheless, relevant literature allows some general conclusions to be drawn: Oral health related quality of life is reduced as the number of remaining teeth decreases; particularly when tooth loss occurs in the anterior region of the mouth. Oral health related quality of life may be improved when lost teeth are restored with a fixed partial denture, but only if it had been adversely affected prior to the rehabilitation. However, this improvement appears to wear off in time. For the completely edentulous, a long term significant improvement is recorded if their conventional mandibular denture is turned into an overdenture retained by two implants. Based on this knowledge, prosthetic rehabilitation should start with a structured interview where the patient’s individual oral health related quality of life is revealed, so that an optimal patient treatment may be administered.