Losing a tooth due to an injury or a disease can have a big negative impact in a number of different ways. It can make it difficult to speak or chew, and it can also affect the aesthetics of your smile, which in turn could have a negative effect on your self-esteem. If you’ve lost a tooth, then you may want to consider dental implants.
Dental implants has become one of the most popular and durable ways to replace a lost tooth. Not only will a dental implant replace the root of the tooth, it will also replace the crown. However, in order to receive a dental implant, you’ll need to have enough bone around it. If there’s not enough bone, you may need grafting.
Increasing Bone Mass Through Grafting
If you’ve been missing a tooth for a long period of time, then the bone volume in that area may have diminished over time. This happens due to the fact that your teeth cause a stimulus to the bone as you chew, thereby replacing older bone cells at a steady rate. If you’ve been without a tooth for over a year, then there’s a good chance that you’ve lost as much as 25 percent of the normal width of the bone below where the tooth used to be. If your tooth was lost to an injury, you may have damaged the bone as a result as well.
Fortunately, there’s something that you can do about that bone loss in order to make sure that you can get dental implants. The first thing we will do at our Waterloo family dentistry is to take x-rays to determine just how much bone you’re missing. We will then use a grafting procedure to create new bone. There are a few ways to do this.
One common grafting technique is ridge augmentation, in which the gum tissues are opened up and a bone graft is inserted within a barrier membrane. The bone will grow over time, replacing the grafting material and the membrane structure as it grows. Once enough bone has been regenerated, we can perform dental implant surgery.