Dental Implants are the most effective and safest way to replace lost teeth. With dental implants, missing teeth are replaced by durable porcelain implants that stay in place with no real effort from the patient. A dental implant is a metal abutment that interfaces powerfully with the healthy bone of your jaw or skull to serve as an anchor for a new tooth or dental prosthetic, such as bridges, dentures, crown, or even facial prosthetic. The new tooth or teeth are installed securely into the bone. Unlike traditional tooth-fixed bridges, dental implants are completely removable, reusable, and extremely durable.
No one knows for certain how humans survived before the invention of dental implants, but millions of people around the world have lost one or more teeth due to disease, trauma, accidents, infection, wisdom tooth disease, or a combination of any of these causes. Even healthy adults can lose one or more teeth during their lifetime. One of the most common causes of tooth loss is tooth decay. Healthy adults lose about one tooth every year, usually due to untreated cavity decay. Healthy adults also experience multiple teeth loss during the course of their lives, sometimes due to disease, trauma, infection, and tooth decay. Older adults are especially vulnerable to multiple tooth loss due to the natural progression of tooth decay and gum disease.
In recent years, much advancement in prosthodontist and cosmetic dentistry has made it possible to restore a single tooth through dental implants. Single tooth prosthodontist involve grafting a tooth root from a healthy part of your head to a damaged or infected tooth. The result is a restoration of strength and function to that tooth. Single tooth prosthodontist can restore function to teeth that have been severely damaged by cavities, broken teeth, infections, or gum disease.
Bonding of the jawbone to the skull is the most common method of surgical placement of dental implants. This procedure has improved over the last few decades because of advances in prosthodontist. Bonding of the jawbone offers two main benefits. It prevents the neighboring teeth from becoming loose, which can reduce the risk of trauma to the adjacent teeth and it provides stability to the jawbone, allowing for the easy movement of the jaw. Bonding of the jawbone can be achieved by surgically placing either titanium or ceramic implant into the jawbone.
Tooth implants have come a long way over the years. Early dental implants used materials such as copper and were extremely heavy. Today’s dental implants are much lighter and often made from titanium. They offer the same strength and durability as other materials used in their manufacture, but require less maintenance and are often more comfortable for the patient.
To date, the U.S. Preventive Services Division has not approved the use of any single prosthetic device for all long-term oral treatment. For this reason, patients with prosthetic teeth must wait at least five years before they can undergo a full teeth replacement surgery. Although there are no definitive guidelines addressing the scheduling of prosthetic teeth replacement, patients must be prepared to wait for at least a minimum of five years after they become eligible for treatment. A systematic review of current research offers some hints regarding the optimal scheduling of prosthetic tooth implant surgeries.
Patients must plan ahead when they contact their orthodontist to discuss possible tooth implant surgery. In a systematic review published in May 2021 in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Associations, the recommended time period for a patient to begin receiving prosthetic dental implants was three to five years before a prosthetic implant surgery. Patients may want to consider waiting until they have completed their college education or have acquired a professional degree in dentistry before they make a decision regarding the scheduling of their surgery. For many dentists, the best time to perform dental implants is after the completion of their dental school and after they have been waiting at least five years to undergo their surgery.
If the benefits of dental implants outweigh the risk of having a poor outcome, then patients should schedule their surgery at the earliest convenience. The most important factor for patients is the success rate of the procedure. This refers to the success rate of the metal implant and the success rate of the natural teeth. Research has shown that patients who receive high quality care by highly qualified dental practitioners have a success rate of approximately 95%. Dentists will use the success rate provided by the patient as one of the many factors they use in scheduling their dental implants.
