Dental Implants Facts

Added: (Mon Jun 08 2009)

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Dental implants have been one of the many early practices of dentistry when it comes to teeth reconstruction or restoration. It has even been stated by the professionals of dental implants los angeles center that the Mayan civilization has been shown to have used the earliest known examples of endosseous implants (implants embedded into bone), dating back over 1,350 years before Per-Ingvar Brånemark started working with titanium.

Composition of Implants
A typical implant consists of a titanium screw (resembling a tooth root) with a roughened or smooth surface. The very first implants were made out of commercially pure titanium, however since it was discovered that the Titanium 6AL-4V (signifying the Titanium alloy containing 6% Aluminium and 4% Vanadium alloy) offered the same osseointegration level as commercially pure titanium, more and more implants were made out of it.

Success Rates

According to dental implants los angeles specialists, dental implant success is related to operator skill, quality and quantity of the bone available at the site, and also to the patient's oral hygiene. The general consensus of opinion is that implants carry a success rate of around 95%.

Failure

Failure of a dental implant is often related to failure to osseointegrate correctly. According to dental implants los angeles specialists, dental implant is considered to be a failure if it is lost, mobile or shows peri-implant (after implant) bone loss of greater than 1.0 mm in the first year and greater than 0.2mm a year after. Dental implants are not susceptible to dental caries but they can develop a periodontal condition called peri-implantitis. The cause may be infection that was introduced during surgery or failure by the patient to follow proper oral hygiene routines. In either case, inflammation in the bone surrounding the implant causes bone loss (recession) which ultimately may lead to failure, often evidenced by the ability to "spin" an implant.

Peri-implantitis is often pre-emptively dealt with by clinicians who prescribe a course of antibiotics in the days prior to surgery and post-surgically with another course of antibiotics and special oral rinses. Since peri-implantitis is generally easy to see on standard panoramic and periapical X-rays, prudent clinicians who suspect the problem will take an X-ray soon after surgery, and again at staged intervals post-operatively.