What are dental implants?

Dental implants are a form of replacing missing teeth.

If you have missing teeth, one of the options is to replace that space with dental implants.

Basically, dental implants have three parts;

• a screw that is placed inside the bone,
• a connector (abutment) that connects the inside world to the outside world, and
• a crown that sits on top of the connector.

Why should I replace missing teeth (teeth that I have had extracted)?

When teeth have been removed, your jawbone begins to shrink from lack of stimulation.

Losing your teeth will affect your smile and change the shape of your face, causing you to look prematurely aged.

Teeth also move and cause changes in your bite and ultimately jaw joint problems.

What are the benefits of dental implants?

Benefits include:

• The comfortable and natural function
• Stronger and secure teeth
• The most permanent solution for a missing tooth or teeth
• Speech impediment reduction
• Restoration and preservation of the regular shape of the mouth, jaws and face

What are the advantages of dental implants compared to bridges or dentures?

With dental implants, you have an individual tooth not connected to either side.

If anything happens in the future, it can be dealt with by itself.

Conventional bridges need the cutting of your natural teeth and three or more teeth are joined together leading to the failure of the whole bridge if there are issues in the future.

Partial dentures (teeth that are taken in and out) are an option as long as you are comfortable with them.

Am I suitable to have dental implants?

Dental Implants are suitable for people of all ages.

As long as you have enough bone to secure the implant.

Where adequate jaw bone is not present such as in cases of long term tooth loss, we do bone grafting and/or gum grafting procedures

What if I don’t have any bone for dental implants?

In this case, we augment the site with some bone (add bone to the area) before placement of the dental implant.

The augmentation can take place on the very same day as the implant placement or 3 months before the implant placement depending on the amount of bone needed.

How long will dental implants last?

How long do teeth last?

They should last a lifetime, however, we all can sight examples where teeth have not served for a person’s lifetime.

We know that dental problems start from improper home care or lack of treatment when needed. The same holds true for dental implants.

With proper care and routine dental check-ups, they should last a lifetime.

No one can give guarantees as the health of a person is dependent upon many factors which are out of the control of one’s dentist, e.g., proper nutritional needs being met, proper hygiene, genetics, and disease processes that might occur.

So, the answer to this question really is that no one knows how long each individual dental implant will last… one’s success can be influenced by the way you live and the quality of the practitioner that you have chosen to do your implants… these things can tip the scales in your favor.

On average they should last from 5 to 20 years.