A thing that's been bugging me for a while - (assigning?) loops

It happens to me often: I have perfectly fine loops along the mesh,
but after a bit of tweaking and adding new loops here and there,
the existing ones seem to ‘break’ occasionally - meaning I can no longer
hit Alt+RMB to select the whole loop, but rather have to click individual edges -
even if the edges are perfectly aligned. So I was wondering, is there a command
that would ‘assign’ the loops/connect the edges, so that Alt+RMB would work again?