How Dental Implants Support Jaw Bone Health

Did you know that your jaw bone can degrade and can have an effect on your appearance? Even minor tooth loss can lead to jawbone loss. 

While dental implants are the only tooth restoration that can preserve the jawbone, you will need to have sufficient bone density to support an implant. Read on in this blog from Washington Dental Studio to find out more about bone loss and dental implants.

Tooth Loss Leads to Jaw Bone Loss

Your jawbone plays an important function in supporting your facial muscles and teeth. When you lose a tooth without replacing it, this will cause irreversible jaw bone loss. 

This is because the jaw bone is stimulated by the roots of your teeth when you chew, which tells it to regenerate new cells. When you lose a tooth, this stimulation ceases to occur, which means the bone stops regenerating. Once you lose bone volume in the jaw, it cannot grow back on its own. 

This can have devastating consequences such as changes to your facial structure, shifting teeth, facial sagging, and lack of support for tooth restorations. It can even increase your risk for TMJ, a painful condition that reduces the mobility of the jaw.

Dental Implants Prevent Bone Loss

The good news is you don’t have to suffer from bone loss if you’ve lost a tooth. A dental implant can replace a missing tooth, restoring not only the crown but also the tooth root. A titanium post is implanted into the jaw and over 3 to 6 months, the jawbone grows around the implant, causing them to fuse through osseointegration. 

This forms an artificial tooth root that your jaw bone doesn’t know the difference. When you chew using this tooth, it will stimulate the jaw bone, regenerate cells and prevent bone loss. Implants are the only tooth restorations that can preserve the jaw bone. Dentures can accelerate bone loss, believe it or not.

However, you will need adequate bone density in the jaw to support dental implants. If you have suffered from tooth loss for a long time, have had gum disease, are a teeth grinder, are older, or have suffered from dental trauma, you may have suffered bone loss. The implants must have enough strong bone to fuse with or osseointegration can fail, causing implant failure.

Am I a Good Candidate for Dental Implants?

The good news is that even if you don’t have sufficient bone structure to support implants naturally, we can perform a bone grafting procedure that can enable you to be a candidate for implants. 

The graft is typically taken from somewhere else in your body and transferred to the jaw to replace and regenerate missing bone. If you’re wondering if you would be a good candidate for dental implants, contact us at Washington Dental Studio to schedule a consultation with our Naperville family dentist.

We can take x-rays to look for sufficient bone dentistry and we also perform bone grafts if you are lacking jaw bone support.

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