Bone Grafting in Hot Springs
To replace a missing tooth with a dental implant, your jawbone must be the appropriate height and width to accept the implant. Implants place an artificial tooth “root” where the natural root used to exist, and if you’ve experienced volume loss in your jawbone, it may not be able to support an implant.
Our oral surgeons have decades of experience and years of specialized training in successfully growing and inserting bone grafts to strengthen the jaw. If you’ve been told you need bone grafting in Hot Springs, contact AOMS for a consultation with one of our experienced and compassionate oral surgeons.
What Are Bone Grafts?
Bone may seem like a fixed, rigid material, but it’s actually living tissue that is constantly growing and rebuilding itself. When you lose a tooth as an adult, the jawbone that previously surrounded and supported the tooth starts to diminish or reabsorb the bone because there is nothing to stimulate it and tell the jaw that it needs to stay and provide support.
That’s where bone grafting comes in. As bone reduces around missing teeth, your jawline recedes. This makes the skin around your facial features sag and start to appear more aged. Bone grafts are built from living bone tissue and attached to the receding jaw to encourage growth and basically rebuild the jawbone to make it strong enough for dental implants.
Different Types of Bone Grafting Techniques
Extraction Socket Bone Preservation
When possible, our surgeons will try to preserve as much of your natural jawbone as possible at the time of tooth extraction. A small bone graft may be recommended during extraction, using either demineralized bone from a donor bank or the patient’s own bone. Inserting a small graft as soon as the tooth is extracted keeps your jawbone from receding and strengthens it for future dental implantation.
Ridge Augmentation
Ridge augmentation is the use of the patient’s own bone or bank bone (or some combination of the two) to replace lost bone and rebuild the jaw structure to prepare it for a tooth implant. This procedure is most often performed when the patient’s teeth have been missing for a long time and they are experiencing severe bone loss.
Sinus Lift
When you lose your teeth, your jawbone recedes, but it can also cause bone volume loss in other bones of the face. If you are missing your upper teeth, sometimes patients experience loss of the maxillary bone–or the upper jaw–which results in a shallow maxillary sinus.
A sinus lift is performed on patients whose maxillary sinuses dip down too low among the roots of the upper jaw’s teeth. A sinus lift can move the floor of the sinus slightly higher, increasing the bone depth of the maxilla with a bone graft. Sinus grafts are a simple and common procedure that our oral surgeons can complete in-office.
The sinus site must heal completely and pass a thorough inspection before dental implants are placed in the area.
If you are considering dental implants, or you think you may need bone grafting in Hot Springs, contact Arkansas Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeons to schedule a consultation! One of our gifted oral surgeons will perform an assessment and help you decide on the best course of treatment.