If you are about to lose some of your teeth through decay or advanced gum disease, you are probably wondering about having dental implants as a brilliant way to replace teeth as they are embedded into the jawbone and no one can tell they’re not your real teeth.
However, being able to have dental implants is dependent upon how healthy and strong your jawbone is.
If you have been missing teeth for some time, or you are a smoker or have had advanced gum disease, your jawbone may not be in as good condition as you would like. As soon as you lose teeth, the bone in the area of the lost tooth understands that it is no longer being used and begins to dissolve itself, releasing the nutrients from the bone back into the bloodstream for use elsewhere in the body.
It used to be that if your jawbone had deteriorated, due to one of the above reasons, your dentist would not be able to fit dental implants. However, at David Madruga in Marylebone, London, we use various techniques to rectify bone density issues.
Over the last decade or so, experimental dentists have come up with some brilliant ways to get around the thorny issue of the jawbone that can no longer support dental implants.
If you have been without teeth in your upper back jaw for some time, what tends to happen is that the sinus cavity starts extending downwards. The layer of bone becomes too thin to hold the entire length of the dental implant, which would not be able to cope with the pressures exerted during chewing, which can be up to 97kg or 220lbs.
The solution is to go into the large sinus cavity, gently push the lining upwards and then insert bone material into the gap between the lining and the bone. Bone material can either come from you as the patient, or from an animal source.
You then have to wait several weeks for the bone material to integrate with your jawbone and once it has done so, we can proceed with placing dental implants into the back of your jaw.