There have been certain dental truisms we are told from childhood onward: brush your teeth and floss every day, see the dentist twice a year, and protect your teeth from harm because they are not going to grow back.
The options of fixing or replacing broken or lost teeth were limited, the procedures unpleasant, and the results usually imperfect. Dentistry has come a long way in the last twenty years. Now, dental implants have become the treatment of choice.
“Before dental implants, we only had the option of root canal treatment and restorative procedures,” Dr. Emil Verban explains. Emil Verban, Jr., DDS, has been practicing dentistry since well before the day of the dental implant and clearly recalls just how much the work of his profession has evolved.
“If teeth were broken off, we could do crown lengthening procedures to increase the amount of tooth structure you could work with,” he continues. “But that required surgical intervention as far as removing some bone around the neck of the tooth. Then, with the advent of dental implants, we started to see them as a better alternative to trying to save teeth that were severely broken down plus in need of root canal treatment.”
The already-proven success rate of dental implants is what helped convince dentists like Dr. Verban to start making the shift to this new procedure. Although the rate of success does depend on the area of the mouth in which the implant is placed, the numbers were still an encouraging 90 to 95 percent over a 10 to 15 year period. As for Dr. Verban’s patients, the success rate is closer to 97 to 98 percent.
Of course, even with a 98 percent success rate, that does mean there is a two percent chance of failure. Dr. Verban explains why failures can still occur. “What we see at times are implant failures in areas where there had been a previous root canal that had failed,” he says.
“Sometimes we think there are some latent bacteria within the bone itself that have contributed to the loss of that implant. There have been situations where we extracted a root canal tooth, placed an implant, had an implant failure, gone back in a second time, placed an implant and were successful.”
So, even in dentistry, the adage of “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” still rings true. Dr. Verban and other dentists are constantly looking for every way to improve their already surprisingly great success rates. Giving a new implant the proper time to heal is one of those ways to improve those rates of success.
“We’re beginning to understand if you can eliminate any stress or force on the implant, keep it below a certain threshold level, and reduce micro-motion on an implant, then you don’t have any problem with the implant healing,” he states. “If, for whatever reason, the implant is overloaded, you then exceed that threshold of micro-motion and you can get failure of the implant.”
Dr. Verban explains that allowing only a bare minimum of micro-motion is as applicable to implant dentistry as it is to orthopedics. “When someone breaks their arm, they put a cast on the arm to prevent movement on each side of the bone where the crack is,” he says. “If you eliminate movement there, then that crack will fill in with new bone and heal. But if there’s movement, you don’t get healing of the bone. With implants, there is a certain amount of mechanical stability to the implant when you first place it. In the first four weeks, that mechanical stability is slowly lost and instead you have bone forming around the implant. So, if you keep stresses off the implant until that bone takes over the stability, you’ll be successful.”
To learn more about the advantages of dental implants, read “Treatment of Choice, Part 2” in next month’s issue of Healthy Cells Magazine.
For more information, you may contact Emil Verban, Jr., DDS at 309-662-8448 or visit www.mcleancountydental.com. McLean County Dental is located at 2103 E. Washington Street in Bloomington. Dr. Verban provides his patients both general dentistry expertise and the ability to provide specialized services such as sedation dentistry, cosmetic procedures, and dental implants.