Dental implants depend on your bone for support. But what happens if you don’t have enough bone to support dental implants? You might have lost bone to injury, disease (especially gum disease), or atrophy after losing your teeth. Whatever the cause of bone loss, a bone graft can help you get the necessary bone to support your teeth. It might even increase the odds of success for your implants!
Many dental practices don’t offer bone grafting. However, the Wichita Falls implant dentists at StarImage Dentistry can help you get bone grafting as well as other forms of oral surgery. However, we also offer an alternative that might mean you don’t need bone grafting, even if you have been wearing dentures for a while.
Teeth-in-a-Day: No Need for Bone Graft in Most Cases
If you are looking to replace an entire arch of teeth (all the teeth on the top or on the bottom), Teeth-in-a-Day can be a great option.
The Teeth-in-a-Day system uses an implant denture attached to four to six dental implants. The denture distributes biting, chewing, and other forces among the dental implants, which keeps any one implant from getting overloaded. This means that the implants don’t need as much bone support. Your Wichita Falls implant dentist will also angle the implants to take maximum advantage of your existing bone.
Taking full advantage of the existing bone and distributing forces means most people won’t need a bone graft with the Teeth-in-a-Day system. No bone graft means that you won’t need a second procedure for the graft or time to let the graft heal. You’ll also avoid the additional cost related to bone grafts.
This makes Teeth-in-a-Day an economical and fast tooth replacement option.
Other Benefits of Teeth-in-a-Day
As if greater speed and lower cost were not enough, Teeth-in-a-Day offers additional benefits, including:
- Beautiful appearance
- Great function
- Comfortable dentures
- Ease and comfort of a fully digital workflow
- Rapid, convenient adjustments, repairs, and replacements
The Wichita Falls cosmetic dentists at StarImage Dentistry pride themselves on always delivering beautiful results for every procedure. Teeth-in-a-Day lets us do that. The advanced dental technology suite supporting the procedure combines CT-guided dental implants with digital implant denture design. We use that, along with our training and experience in cosmetic dentistry to deliver a beautiful smile every time.
Traditional dentures have terrible function because they aren’t anchored in your mouth. They hold to your gums with suction, which is not very strong, so they slide around easily. With Teeth-in-a-Day, dental implants anchor your replacement teeth so that you can bite and chew normally.
With Teeth-in-a-day, you’ll avoid denture discomfort. Traditional dentures often cause pain because the denture is teeth resting on your gums, which are soft tissue not suited to supporting bite forces. The dental implants of the Teeth-in-a-Day system take the bite forces, keeping your gums comfortable.
Teeth-in-a-Day doesn’t just deliver great results; it allows for a great experience thanks to its fully digital workflow. We can take impressions for the implant and denture in less than a minute with our camera. You won’t have to bite into messy, gross impression trays–we just take pictures.
With the power of Teeth-in-a-Day plus the experience and expertise of our implant dentists, problems are rare. However, if they do occur, you’ll be able to get them fixed quickly. We can reprint your replacement teeth in just one day if they break or need replacement.
When You Might Need Bone Grafting
However, there are still some situations where the Wichita Falls implant dentists at StarImage Dentistry might recommend a bone graft. This can include:
- Replacing only one tooth or a few teeth
- Severe gum disease
- Major jaw injury
- Extreme resorption
- Bad luck
The Teeth-in-a-Day system replaces all your teeth in an arch. If you’re replacing less than that, you will have fewer implants and less denture to brace your replacement teeth. In this case, you might need a bone graft even in the case of a relatively small amount of bone loss.
On the other hand, there are some situations where excessive bone loss is too much, even for the Teeth-in-a-Day system. If you had severe gum disease, a major jaw injury, or extreme resorption of the jawbone, there might not be enough bone for support, despite the optimal placement and the structural stability the denture provides.
Sometimes, too, it’s just a question of bad luck. You might have mostly good bone structure but be missing it in the exact spot where the Teeth-in-a-Day system needs it.
Types of Bone Grafts
Not all bone grafts are the same. Different bone grafts repair different types of bone loss. The most common types of bone graft include:
- Socket preservation
- Ridge augmentation
- Sinus lift
Socket preservation is very common for single-tooth implants and short implant bridges. Extracting your tooth leaves a large hole, or socket, in the jawbone. This hole is larger than the implant needs. Because it’s made of strong titanium, the implant doesn’t need to be as wide as your natural teeth, so there’s space around the implant in the socket. Socket preservation fills that hole in to give better support to the dental implant.
Your Wichita Falls implant dentist will use ridge augmentation to build up the bone structure that supports your teeth and/or dental implants. It reverses the effects of gum disease, jaw injury, and bone resorption.
Sinus lifts correct a special type of bone resorption. When you lose your molars–your square, back teeth–your sinus sometimes expands into the place where the large roots used to be. Ensuring sufficient support for implants means filling in the expanded sinus with replacement bone.
Get Dental Implants in Wichita Falls
Whether you’re replacing an entire arch of teeth or not, whether you need a bone graft or have sufficient bone, the Wichita Falls implant dentists at StarImage Dentistry can help. Let us evaluate your situation and recommend the solution that will give you beautiful, functional, comfortable results.
Please call 940-322-2252 or use our online form to request an appointment at StarImage Dentistry, located near Wichita Falls High School.
