Medical Insider–Dr Rhoda entero

Zirconia Dental Implants

Part 1

We are having a new topic today. This is all about dental implant. 

Dental implants are synthetic tooth roots that connect the false tooth crown or bridge to your jaw in order to better simulate natural teeth. It’s a frame or metal post that’s surgically positioned into the jawbone right beneath your gums. This entails cutting through the gums and drilling through the bone in order to screw the post there before the gums are stitched up and allowed to heal. Once everything is fully healed, then the dentist will screw in the crown or bridge plus abutment.

Once they’ve been put into place, they enable your crown to get mounted and your missing teeth to get replaced with amazing results. 

Unlike removable false teeth, the dental implant is more permanent and stable. It allows your crown to work and appear like a normal natural tooth by using the implant as its tooth root anchor.

How Do Dental Implants Work?

Implants fuse to your jawbone, thus providing a stable support or foundation for your artificial teeth or dentures, whether they’re crowns or bridges. Once your dental prosthodontics are mounted unto your implant or implants, they won’t shift or slip into your mouth. Implants are quite expensive compared to teeth extraction or a root canal treatment that allows you to preserve the original tooth while removing the infected tooth root instead.

Here are some points we have to remember about dental implants:

*Eating and Speaking: The most common issue people have with removable dentures aside from hygiene concerns is how unstable they can get. Some have even ended up swallowing or choking on their dentures accidentally. It’s important to have implants because they allow your prosthetic teeth to be stable enough to use for eating and speaking.

*Secure Fit: Implants are further characterized by how bridges and dentures tend to have a secure fit over them with the assistance of fillers known as abutment. This results in a hard base that’s not easy to dislodge, kind of like a natural tooth with a root that’s linked deep into the socket of the jawbone. You can put in All-on-4, All-on-6, or All-on-8 dental implants to replace someone’s teeth after he had lost all of them, with him only left with gums. They feel more natural than conventional dentures or bridges to boot.

*More Comfortable Than Uncomfortable Dentures: There are some people who are simply uncomfortable with ordinary removable dentures and bridges that require you to chisel healthy teeth to turn them into anchors or abutments for the prosthetic crowns. Some might induce things like gagging, poor ridges, and sore spots. Your gums might also end up infected or allergic to the metal, leading to swelling and irritation. Ordinary bridges also tend to necessitate destroying the tooth or teeth on either side of the missing tooth or teeth.

*The Implant Advantage: Additionally, implants have the advantage of not needing adjacent teeth to anchor the bridge, crown, or denture. Because of its natural feel, you’re less likely to get irritated gums or gag reflex from them. Your mouth will easily accept the prosthodontics better and will get used to it more easily.  Your dentist won’t have to ground or prepare adjacent teeth to hold your new false tooth or teeth into place. The major downside to this is obviously the need to cut open your gums and access the jawbone, which takes weeks to months to fully heal.

Requirements: Not everyone can receive implants. You need to have adequate jawbone mass and support as well as healthy gums in order to become a viable candidate for dental implantation surgery. If not, you can get it later once you’ve healed your gums and have bone grafting surgery that grafts more bone on top of your jaw so that there’s more bone available to fuse with the implant. Keeping your gums and bones healthy also requires regular dental visits and meticulous oral hygiene. This is also called for when it comes to ensuring the long-term success of your dental implant.

The main reason why dental implants aren’t as common as dental extractions and root canal therapy is because it’s infamously expensive compared to other tooth replacement options. Also, most insurance companies cover only less than 10 percent of the price of an implant. The rest you have to pay for out of pocket dental model with different types of treatments (implant placement, bonded bridge, crown over implant) isolated on white background.

Throughout the years, the materials used for dental treatments such as implant surgery were mostly metallic in nature. This is because metal is known to be sturdy and long-lasting. The mechanical strength of metal can withstand the constant bite forces of your mouth, particularly the molar or back tooth portion of your bite. Metal also augments the dental implant’s longevity.

As science marched on, research has enormously contributed to improved mechanical strength of ceramic materials. At the start, ceramics were introduced into dental treatments because of their superior aesthetics to metal options. However, further discoveries about the material showed that aesthetics isn’t its only beneficial property. Ceramics are also non-allergic, non-corrosive, and inert, making them many more times beneficial to dental implant longevity and patient health. (To be continued)