Healthy gums and bone density are important for a successful implant procedure because the titanium post is implanted directly into your jawbone and your gums provide surrounding support for the implant.
If you lack sufficient bone structure, there won’t be enough support to hold the implants in place. This can cause issues during osseointegration when the implant is supposed to fuse with the jawbone. Lacking bone support can cause implant failure.
Read on in this blog from Dental Studio 920 to find out how you can become a candidate for dental implants despite lacking bone support.
There are a variety of causes of bone loss, ranging from oral health problems and accidents to certain restorative prostheses. Your jawbone is preserved by a continual regeneration of cells that occurs when the jawbone is provided with stimulation when you chew.
The biggest causes of bone loss are tooth loss and gum disease. When you lose a tooth, the jawbone is no longer receiving the same stimulation and this causes bone resorption. This is an irreversible process that will only continue to worsen with time.
Gum disease in the advanced stages causes severe gum recession, loose teeth, and bone loss. Other causes include dental trauma which has damaged the underlying bone, a misaligned bite that can lead to wearing down of the jawbone through teeth grinding and even the placement of dentures and dental bridges.
While dentures and bridges can replace missing teeth and restore your ability to speak and chew, they do not provide stimulation to the underlying bone and can even accelerate bone loss because of the pressure being placed on the alveolar ridge.
Although many patients suffer from bone loss and a strong and healthy jawbone is necessary to support implants, this doesn’t mean you are completely ineligible for dental implants. There are many different procedures that we can perform to make you a candidate for implants.
If you have suffered from bone loss as a result of gum disease, we will first need to treat the infection and make sure it has been reversed. Bone grafting is a common procedure that is performed before the placement of implants to replace and regenerate missing bone support.
When you are looking to replace missing molars in the back of the mouth with dental implants but lack enough bone support to do so, this is often because the bone loss has caused a collapse of the socket which reduces the height, width, and volume of the jawbone.
By lifting the sinuses, we create enough space between the sinuses and the upper jaw to replace the missing bone with bone grafts. Another option is to get a type of dental implant that doesn’t require significant bone support, such as all-on-four implants.
These can be placed in the lower jaw with very minimal bone density and in the upper jaws with low bone density. They do not require the same amount of bone support as traditional implants. In cases of severe bone loss, all-on-four can be combined with bone grafting.
You should be pleased to know that most people can become a candidate for dental implants even if they currently aren’t. Contact us at Dental Studio 920 today to schedule a consultation with Dr. Sam Schmidt and we can discuss your options.