Believe it or not, dental implants do more than help Moore dental patients replace missing teeth. They stimulate patients’ jawbone tissue, too, so jawbones don’t resorb, or shrink, due to the lack of a tooth root in your jawbone.
This crucial aspect of dental implants actually provides Moore patients with a greater benefit than just replacement teeth that are built to last a lifetime, when cared for properly. By helping to retain jawbone shape and size, the titanium implants actually keep patients’ jawbone tissue from shrinking, meaning their adjacent natural teeth aren’t at risk for falling out due to lost jawbone tissue, and their facial appearance won’t fold in due to jawbone tissue loss.
The Importance of Your Jawbone
Your jawbone is the material that your natural teeth anchor into. But it’s also an important part of your craniofacial anatomy and helps give you the aesthetics of your lower face.
Oral surgeons like Dr. Perry Brooks and Dr. Seth Brooks know that missing teeth put you at risk not only for losing teeth functionality and smile aesthetics but for Moore patients who are missing multiple teeth, the lack of jawbone stimulation by natural tooth roots can cause your jawbone to shrink, leading to a host of other problems.
Issues that Moore patients can experience from having jawbone tissue lost as the result of missing teeth include:
- Bone resorption that begins to affect the way adjacent natural teeth are anchored into your jawbone. This can result in your natural teeth shifting, moving, becoming loose (even too loose to provide proper functionality), or even falling out!
- Requiring even more dental implants to be placed due to adjacent natural teeth falling out.
- Changing your lower face bone structure so that your mouth looks sunken in because there’s not enough jawbone tissue remaining to provide the filled out aesthetics you had before you lost your teeth.
How Dental Implants Stop Additional Tooth and Craniofacial Issues
The titanium rods of dental implants are inserted directly into your jawbone, where your natural teeth are missing. This means that your jawbone is being stimulated again, and it will continue to regenerate in a healthy manner.
For some patients who receive implants, they’ve been missing teeth for enough time that their jawbone tissue has already shrunk, and won’t hold implants in place. That’s okay, though – there’s a surgery to fix that, too! Dr. Perry Brooks or Dr. Seth Brooks can help you “regrow” lost jawbone tissue by performing a bone grafting surgery. While it may require you to wait about 6-9 months to receive your implants, it’ll help your jawbone grow strong so that it can fuse with the titanium implants.
And when you have a healthy jawbone – either because you had implants placed immediately after teeth were extracted or you had a bone grafting surgery to “regrow” your bone – it’s extremely rare that’ll you’ll need to worry about craniofacial implications. Because your jawbone is strong, it’ll help maintain the shape of your existing smile, and mouth, so you won’t have that sunken in look.
Call Our Practice to Learn More
Whether you have more questions about implants, or you want to inquire about a bone grafting surgery so that Moore oral surgeons Dr. Perry Brooks or Dr. Seth Brooks can “regrow” your jawbone tissue, we’re happy to help. Simply call our practice today at (405) 329-3500.
