How Bone Grafting Prepares You for Implants
When a tooth is lost and not replaced immediately, jaw bone deterioration will occur. When you lose bone in your jaw, it becomes more difficult to place dental implants. Bone loss also can alter your bite, causes surrounding teeth to shift, and even changes your facial appearance. In order to place implants and restore your jaw, we can perform a variety of bone grafting procedures. Bone grafting is the process of adding bone material to locations that are lacking adequate volume in order to restore the jaw and prepare for dental implants.
We perform multiple bone grafting treatments depending on your needs:
Ridge Augmentation
When your jaw has experienced bone loss, we can place bone grafting material over the location of deterioration. This graft will integrate with your natural jaw bone and create a solid, even foundation for dental implants.
Socket Preservation
When we extract a tooth, we will always preserve the tooth socket with a bone graft. This restores volume, prevents teeth from shifting and prepares the location for dental implant placement.
Sinus Lift
When teeth need to be replaced in the upper molar area, there is often a lack of bone due to the sinus cavity residing directly above. With a sinus lift, we can gently reposition the sinus membrane and place bone grafting material in this area to restore volume to the site.
Guided Tissue Regeneration (GTR)
We can place a GTR membrane to cover a bone graft in the hopes of speeding up recovery time and enhancing the bone regeneration. This also acts as a barrier to prevent the gums from healing into the site of the bone graft.
The Bone Grafting Procedure
When performing a bone graft procedure, we carefully retract your gums to expose the recessed jaw bone underneath. We will then take a sample of bone from you, or a donor source, and create bone granules that are easily packed on the site of recession. We may then use GTR to place a barrier membrane over the granules to promote healing and protect the site. After healing, you should have enough bone volume for dental implants to be placed successfully.
An Experienced Team Dedicated to Your Needs
If you are seeking dental implants or implant supported dentures and have missing teeth, there is a good chance you will need bone grafting treatment. Thanks to our sedation options, bone grafting is virtually painless and gets you on track to a beautiful and functional mouth. Our doctors are pioneers in implant dentistry, having placed well over 25,000 dental implants, many of which requiring bone grafting treatment. With any procedure, we always aim to provide the most effective, long-lasting results, and with bone grafting, we can ensure your implants and jaw stay healthy.