Day1: Soft Tissue Management of Gingival Recession Around Teeth

Treatment of gingival recession has become an important therapeutic issue due to the increasing number of cosmetic requests from patients. Patients' aesthetic demand, due to exposure of portions of the root surface during smiling or function, is the main indication for surgical root coverage procedures. Very often, the most coronal millimeter/s of the root exposure is the only visible part of the recession when smiling, therefore, the presence and/or the persistence after therapy, even of a shallow recession, may be an aesthetic problem for the patient. Thus, complete root coverage up to the cemento-enamel junction is the goal when a patient complains about the aesthetic appearance of his/her teeth. New knowledge in soft tissue surgical management permits achieving esthetic coverage in gingival recession with minimally invasive connective tissue grafts.

Another factor to be considered is that most frequently, gingival recessions affect a group of adjacent teeth. In order to minimize the number of surgeries and to optimize the aesthetic result, all the contiguous recessions should be treated at the same surgical time. A new approach of the coronally advanced flap has been used to treat multiple recession defects affecting adjacent teeth in patients with aesthetic demands. This surgical technique has been demonstrated to achieve complete root coverage in all treated recessions in most of the patients, regardless of the number of recessions treated in each intervention. These outcomes can be long-term maintained.

Day 2: Mucogingival Esthetic Surgery Around
The recession of the buccal soft tissue margin is a frequent complication of well-integrated dental implants. The appearance of metallic structure or even their transparency through the thin buccal soft tissues are common reasons for patient aesthetic complaints. Moreover, bad implant installation frequently results in excessive apical dislocation of the buccal soft tissue margin of the implant-supported crown. Soft tissue plastic surgical procedures and bilaminar techniques in particular, can be successfully used in combination with a pre and postsurgical prosthetic approaches to increase the volume of the interdental soft tissue, to treat buccal gingival recessions and soft tissue dehiscence around dental implants, and to provide the new implant-supported crown with an esthetic trans mucosal emergency profile.

Topic of the Workshop: Mucogingival esthetic surgery

• The hands-on course is planned and designed to develop periodontal surgical skills.
• The workshop aims to teach the participants the procedure of the coronal advanced flap and the harvesting technique of the connective tissue graft for the treatment of gingival recessions.
• The workshop will be held by Prof. Zucchelli, who will show on the animal's jaw the procedures that will be performed by all the participants. Participants will be individually followed while performing the exercises and will receive direct suggestions from the mentors.

Learning objectives of the workshop:
• Describe step-by-step root coverage surgical procedures.
• Describe step-by-step connective tissue graft harvesting.
• Suturing techniques.