A missing tooth creates a gap in your smile, affects your ability to chew properly, which impacts your diet and nutrition, and alters the shape of your face making you appear aged. As if that weren’t enough, did you know it can also lead to bone loss? When a tooth falls out, the jawbone beneath it shrinks, or atrophies, and becomes brittle due to a lack of exercise. Fortunately, you can reclaim your smile with dental implants. A dental implant, sometimes called an esthetic or cosmetic implant, involves placing a tiny titanium post that fuses with your jawbone and supports a crown or bridge for permanent, natural-looking results that function just like your original teeth.
How do
Dental Implants Work?
Many people are surprised at how simple dental implant surgery is and sometimes they’re afraid to look into the procedure because they let their imaginations run wild. The truth is, most patients experience no pain during cosmetic implant surgery and very minimal discomfort afterwards.
Benefits of Dental/Cosmetic Implants
- Replaces one or more missing teeth
- Maintains your bone
- Restores your smile
- Allows you to chew properly
- Takes years off your appearance
- Doesn’t come loose like dentures
Dental implants are replacements for the root portions of your teeth and are placed directly into your jawbone while you’re numb and relaxed. The implants are made using commercially pure titanium or titanium alloys since titanium fuses easily with the bone through a process called osseointegration. The implant is engineered in a way that maximizes its “surface area to bone” contact. This is achieved by giving the implant a spiraling shape (similar to a screw) with multiple threads and by microscopically altering or roughening its surface. These two methods give the implant stability and allow it to be fit precisely, which is crucial in initiating healing and fusion. Once the bone bonds with the implant, we can attach lifelike dentures to for a simple crown or bridge replacement system.
How Implants Compare to Traditional Dentures
Dentures have been a solution for missing teeth for centuries, but they have a few notable flaws. When we use our own teeth to chew, it stimulates the jaw bone and keeps it strong. Dentures aren’t very effective at providing this stimulation, resulting in oral health problems like bone loss in the jaws. This, in turn, can lead to the dentures not fitting very well, so they can slip and fall out easily and leave the gums feeling sore.
Dental implants, on the other hand, are artificial teeth that are placed into the jawbone and function the same way as the roots of teeth. Implants greatly reduce the risk of bone loss and they won’t slip and slide while you’re trying to chew your food or have an engaging conversation. Taking care of implants is the same as taking care of natural teeth. True, the price tag can be higher with implants than dentures, but that’s pretty much the only advantage removable dentures have as replacement teeth. Implants can replace individual teeth or they can be used as anchors to support full or partial dentures.
Benefits of Dental Implants
Dental implants are the gold standard for replacing missing teeth in modern dentistry. Anyone missing teeth understands that they sacrifice confidence and the ability to smile and laugh without covering their mouths in shame. The most obvious of benefits is the ability for greater enjoyment of life. But the benefits go far beyond this:
- Improved appearance and overall self-esteem: Dental implants look and feel like your own teeth because they permanently fuse with the bone. They give you back your smile and help you feel confident in yourself.
- Improved speech: With dentures, the teeth can slip and slide in the mouth, causing slurring or mumbling. With dental implants, you speak without the worry that teeth might slip.
- Improved comfort and convenience: Because they become part of you, there is no more embarrassing inconvenience of removing dentures or the need for messy adhesives to keep them in place.
- Easier eating: Sliding dentures can make chewing especially difficult. Dental implants function like your own teeth, allowing you to eat your favorite foods without pain. Teeth are supported by stable and robust implant posts that have fused with your jawbone.
- Improved oral health: Dental implants don’t require attachment to other teeth, as a tooth-supported bridge does. Because nearby teeth don’t support the implant, your original teeth are left intact, improving long-term oral health.
- Durability: Implants are long-lasting and durable. With proper care, they will last many years. Some implants can last a lifetime.
- Stopping bone loss: A natural tooth root provides continual stimulation to the bone surrounding it through force whenever you bite down or chew with that tooth. If the tooth is absent, this stimulation is lost, and the bone recedes. By replacing your tooth root with a dental implant post, stimulation is restored to your jawbone, halting further bone loss.
- Healthy remaining natural teeth: Restoring missing teeth with dental implants protects your remaining teeth by preventing them from moving out of position and maintaining your natural bite.
Caring for Dental Implants
To ensure that your implant lasts as long as it should, you should keep up with good daily oral hygiene habits. An implant can’t get a cavity like a normal tooth, but because it lacks the periodontal ligament between the gum and implant, the surrounding tissue can be vulnerable to infection. We encourage our dental implant patients to be diligent with brushing and flossing so that they can avoid problems like peri-implantitis.
The Anatomy of a Dental Implant
There are three parts that make up a dental implant.
- The implant: a titanium screw, which is surgically placed into the patient’s jaw bone where the original tooth used to be
- The abutment: a small piece that ensures a snug fit
- Crown: the top part of the tooth, which is attached to the implant and matches your natural teeth
Before & After
35
More than 35 million Americans are missing all of their teeth in one or both jaws.
98
Dental implants have a success rate of over 98%.
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Approximately three million people have dental implants and the number is continuing to skyrocket.
Don’t let missing teeth hold you back! Enhance your smile and quality of life with dental implants.
