Information For Study Volunteers

Volunteer Profile: Ernest Smith

“They feel just like real teeth, and I feel great!”

Retired after a long career as a machinist for Pratt & Whitney, Coventry resident Ernest J. Smith now delivers automobiles for a Manchester dealership. His assignments have taken him as far afield as Bangor, Maine and Buffalo, New York. He almost never stays overnight. Once, hauling a trailer, he drove from Connecticut San Diego, California in three and a half days.

“I like driving,” says the energetic 73-year-old. Growing up on a farm in Manchester, Smith developed an appreciation for hard work as a boy. Never a couch potato, he has remained active and physically fit all of his life and enjoys good health.

But in 2004 he began to experience problems with the dental bridges he’d had for 25 years. “They were simply worn out,” he says. The dentures made it impossible for him to chew food as well as he had in the past, and Smith began to experience chronic indigestion and other health problems.

Then his wife, a retired state employee, learned about a new study. Doctors at the UConn Health Center had pioneered a novel kind of dental implants and they were looking for volunteers to test them.

Smith made an appointment, got checked out and learned he was an ideal candidate for the new implant procedure, in which posts are surgically inserted into patients’ jaw bones, providing an anchor for permanent dentures. UConn researchers have also developed highly durable new alternatives to traditional porcelain dentures.

Inside of two months, Smith had an entirely new set of teeth. “I can chew anything I had trouble chewing before,” he says. “They feel just like real teeth, and I feel great!”