Tooth replacement options have been around for a long time — from early wooden pegs to animal bones, humans have been replacing missing teeth for thousands of years. Today, we’re getting awfully close to the real deal with dental implants, which mimic natural teeth right down to the roots.
To give you an idea about why five million dental implants are placed each year, and this number is growing, Hillsdale Dental Care’s team — under the direction of Dr. Roge Jacob and Dr. Magdalena Azzarelli — presents the following reasons.
To remain strong, the bones in your body are constantly remodeling themselves, which is true of your jawbone. When your body receives a signal that the bone is in use, it sends in resources to rebuild bone to keep the active area strong.
When you lose a tooth, you also lose the roots that extend into your jawbone. These roots are what signaled your body that the area was active and that your jaw needed to be strong to support the tooth. Absent this signal, your jawbone no longer rebuilds itself and bone loss begins.
With dental implants, we place a new “root” into your jawbone in the form of a metal post. Once your jaw recognizes the new support structure, it grows bone around it to fuse it into place. Once secure, the implant signals to your body that the area is still active and your body once again sends in resources to keep remodeling the bone.
As we discussed above, your jawbone fuses your implant into position, which provides you with far more stability than other replacement options. So, you won’t have to worry about speaking funny or avoiding some of your favorite foods when you have a dental implant.
Since a dental implant becomes a part of your natural jawbone, this tooth replacement option really goes the distance. To put some numbers to this, a study on the long‐term clinical performance of dental implants in nearly 11,000 implants found success rates of:
These survival rates of implants demonstrate how durable these replacement teeth can be, which also makes them an economical choice. While a bridge may be less expensive up front, if you have to replace it repeatedly, paying more for a dental implant the first time around can make good financial sense in the long run.
Rounding out the four most popular reasons why our patients choose dental implants is that they’re, quite simply, super easy to take care of. Once we place the crown over the implant, you take care of your dental implant the same way you tend to your other teeth — regular brushing, flossing, and rinsing.
There are no special instructions for dental implants, which makes them far easier to deal with than other replacement options like dentures, which often require extra care.
If you’d like to explore whether dental implants are the best option for replacing your missing tooth (or teeth), please contact our office in San Jose, California, to set up an appointment.
