Risk Factors And Complications Of Dental Implants

In dental clinics, utilizing dental implants is widely accepted in modern practice. Limited understanding of implant complications exists. Along with this, it is also not known well how often these complications occur.

One of the more desirable points to understand is if complications may be avoided. The ones that are associated with a patient risk factor are the easiest to avoid. This would include things such as patients smoking, or if one utilizes a medication that would inhibit surgical healing. Those are factors that can be fixed prior to the surgery and prevent a potential complication.

A recent study out of the Harvard dental school of medicine looked at hundreds of dental implant procedures to see what complications occurred from the surgeries and how often. What they noted out of the 677 procedures is that complications occurred 14% of the time. Their main objective was to see which risk factors were present that could be avoided.

Among this 14% complication rate, the breakdown was as follows. Most commonly, inflammatory complications occurred at 10%. Prosthetic complications occurred at 2.7% and operative complications came in at 1%.

The inflammatory complications were broken out into the following subcategories. One was impaired wound healing at 0.7%, infection at 2.4%, mobility issues at 4%, pain at 1.6%, gingival recession at 0.4%, and peri-implantitus at 1%.

Looking at the risk factors associated with implant complications, there were several that increase the risk statistically. Factors that increase the overall risk included patient smoking, use of reconstructive procedures, and implants that were placed in one stage by dentists in Tucson.

With regards to inflammatory complications, risk factors included patient smoking, the use of one stage implants, and the use of reconstructive procedures. With regards to operative complications, risk factors included once again the use of reconstructive procedures, along with implants being placed into the jaw.

The main conclusion that the authors came to was that they wanted to identify risk factors associated with implant complications that the dentist could actually modified to enhance the outcomes. With that identified were basically 2, those being use of tobacco in patients along with staging of implants into 2 procedures.

With dentists in Tucson to perform implants they should try to get their patients to stop smoking as early as possible prior to the procedure. It is well-known that smoking tobacco inhibits blood flow which can increase the risk of complications. Wounds truly need blood flow to heal properly, and smoking may cause healing to be prolonged or simply lead to an infection.

The added consideration seen from this research project is that performing the implants should be done in 2 stages by dentists Chandler AZ. Most dental implant surgeons do this anyway, by initially putting the temporary tooth in the implant, letting the implants solidify into the bone, and then putting in a permanent tooth.