It’s one of the most important limiting factors in getting dental implants: how much jawbone a person has. If a person has inadequate bone to support dental implants, they may be prevented from getting treatment, or they may have to undergo bone grafts or other treatments before getting dental implants. Now, though, new treatment alternatives may let more people get dental implants than ever before.
A New Option for Dental Implants
For people with some amount of jawbone loss, there are many options, such as mini implants, or angled implants. However, it’s been uncertain whether these treatments would help completely edentulous patients–those that have lost all their teeth–and who want a complete restoration with dental implants, which is serious because patients who have lost all their teeth often have some degree of jawbone loss.
Now, though, a recent study shows that people with significant jawbone loss can get a full mouth restoration using a typical implant-supported prosthetic. Although the prosthetic is supported by the typical 4 dental implants, the difference is that some of the implants were angled, and the implants used were smaller (3.5mm as opposed to the normal 4.0 mm).
The results were great over the period of the study. None of the study’s 227 patients had a restoration fail on them, although a few individual implants did fail. The overall survival rate for the implants was 98.7%.
Time to Get a Second Opinion
If you’ve been told that you aren’t a candidate for dental implants because you don’t have adequate jaw bone to support the implants, you should get a second opinion. Not only does improving technology give us new options all the time, but individual dentists use different techniques to achieve dental stability where other dentists think it can’t be done.
At Rice Dentistry in Orange County, we use the latest techniques to help our patients get the best results from dental implants and other dental restorations. Please contact us today to schedule your appointment at our office in Irvine, California.
