Dental Medicine and Orthodontics

Anterior open bite (AOB) is defined as the lack of incisal contact between anterior teeth in centric relation. Prevalence in the population ranges from 1.5% to 11%.6. The age factor, however, affects prevalence, since sucking habits decrease and oral function matures with age. At six years old 4.2% present with AOB whereas at age 14 the prevalence decreases to 2%. Anterior open bite is considered to be one of the most difficult treatments. Proper diagnosis and treatment planning, successful treatment, and retention have been stressed for the long-term stability of open bite treatment. There are several factors that could be related to the development of open bite. Among these are an unfavorable mandibular growth pattern, heredity, imbalances between jaw postures, digit-sucking habits, nasopharyngeal airway obstruction, tongue posture and activity and head position. Various treatment modalities have been proposed for the correction of anterior open bites: surgical and nonsurgical. Vertical control during comprehensive orthodontic treatment has been a challenging problem in orthodontics. It is known that fixed appliance therapy tends to extrude teeth and increase the mandibular plane angle during treatment. More recently, some clinicians have introduced the use of clear aligners to control the vertical dimension, citing the development of posterior open bites at the end of clear aligner treatment. However, with a series of improvements (G series) introduced over the past few years, several clinical case reports using clear aligners have shown good vertical control of the posterior teeth. The biomechanics for anterior open bite correction with clear aligners involve the following: relative extrusion of the incisorspure, extrusion of the incisors, posterior intrusion of the maxillary and mandibular teeth. We will present an adult case treated with invisalign. The treatment duration was 40 weeks and the anterior open bite was mainly corrected with relative extrusion of the incisors.