Dental implants are an amazing innovation that allows us to replace your lost teeth with completely natural-looking new teeth. But ensuring that you get the best-looking results from your dental implants depends partly on the implant and partly on your natural tissues. We will work with you to help ensure that you get attractive, natural results without any gaps or holes around dental implants.
A Good Foundation
The most important part of dental implant success is the part you’ll never get to see: the bone that supports your implant. You need to have good bone volume and density to ensure that the implant stays where it’s supposed to. The bone also supports the soft tissues, your gums, so they maintain an attractive appearance around the implant.
We will use bone grafting to help build up and maintain bone volume, but you have a part to play, too. Let us know about any medications or supplements you are taking. Many of them can affect your bone volume or structure or impact your implant healing. Among the most important are oral bisphosphonates (osteoporosis medications) and SSRIs, antidepressants like Zoloft or Paxil. You also need to make sure you’re getting a good balance of nutrition to support bone health, ideally through your diet (and, of course, getting enough sun to produce vitamin D).
Supporting Soft Tissue
Maintaining healthy gum tissue around the dental implant is crucial to achieving a natural appearance. Loss of gum tissue around the implant can lead to black triangles or gaps in your smile, and, unfortunately, gum tissue doesn’t bond as well to implants as it does to natural teeth, so we have to be careful.
You may have to commit to changes in your oral hygiene routine to protect your gum tissue as well as the bone around your implant. It won’t be major changes, just ensuring that you’re really brushing and flossing properly–and making your regular checkups.
We will work to maintain the gum structures around your natural teeth when we place your dental implant. This begins with the extraction. We may refer you to a specialist for complex extractions so we don’t end up damaging the tissues that we need to ensure your dental implant looks good. Often, getting your restoration completed at the same time as your implant is placed can help maintain delicate gum structures.
Attractive Crowns
The final touch in achieving a healthy, attractive appearance is the dental crown. We will design your dental crown to blend in well with your neighboring teeth, and, if you like, it can be made to retain any unique characteristics from the tooth you lost. The dental crown should fill the space, helping to close off any gaps, with natural contacts with adjacent teeth. And, of course, it has to match the color of your natural teeth.
If you want to learn more about how we are able to achieve really natural results with your dental implants, please call (914) 526-2144 for an appointment with a Mohegan Lake implant dentist at Advanced Dentistry of Mohegan Lake.
