The Most Important Thing About Dental Implant Treatment isn't the Dental Implant.

If you are researching about dental implant treatment, there is so much information, some is right, some is not so accurate.

A lot of emphasis is often placed on the dental implant systems, brands but really, this doesn't matter as much as you might think.

So what does matter?

Well, maybe are getting focussed on the wrong thing here. There are many different dental implant designs, and we certainly feel that there is no one dental implant that is the best.

Other factors are more important, for example the skill and experience of the dentist carrying out the treatment, or the health and quality of the gum around the dental implant.

Really, if you are seeing a skilful and experienced dentist for your treatment, they are probably taking the gum quality into account.

Different qualities of gum

Lets keep things really simple, there are two qualities of gum in a healthy mouth. There is gum on the roof of your mouth, and there is gum on the inside of your cheek.

Yes, I know this isn't what you would normally think about when we talk about gum, but this gum extends nearly to your natural teeth.

The difference between these gum tissues is that one is firm and hard, and the other is soft and flexible.

The hard one has much more keratin in it, and its the keratin which makes it hard and firm.

There is also a reason that its hard gum that is naturally around teeth.

You can think of it like it is forming a seal around the teeth and protecting the tooth from bacteria that can cause gum disease.

When we are planning dental implants, we want the gum to be this hard and keratinised gum, but we don't always have this.

If we look at this picture, the picture is of the lower jaw, where teeth have been missing for a long time. You can see that there is hardly any hard gum, its just a very thin line in the middle where the teeth should be.

If we just placed implants here, the gum around the implants would be soft, and although the implants would likely work in the short term (4-5 years), they would be at high risk of failing in the medium term.

So what can we do?

The simplest thing is to do a type of gum graft here. There are several types, but our goal is to improve the amount of hard, keratinised gum here, and improve the thickness of the gum too (yes, thickness matters!).

This can be done at one of several stages, for example, it can be done before placing any dental implants, or it could be at the time of placing the dental implants, and sometimes, it can be done after the placement of the dental implants.

I know it looks intense, but this actually heals very quickly, and this treatment took about 90 minutes to do.

For all on 4 cases, where we remove the teeth, place implants, and then temporary teeth, all in one day, there have been occasions where we ask the patient to not have temporary teeth, or delay implants, just so we can control the gum. This is never what a patient wants to hear, but once we explain the reasoning, most of our patients are happy to wait a few months to get a better long term result.

There are several other aspects to the gum that are also important, I have briefly mentioned the gum thickness, but also the design of the tooth on the implant, and the angle that it comes out of the gum is important! There are too many variables for one short post, but they will likely be covered in other posts, so you can sign up to our mailing list to get notified of new posts, when I get around to writing them!

Free Consultation

Book Now