Dental Implants Are NOT all the Same!

The success of your dental implants is influenced by a lot of factors, even including the brand of implant material used by your doctor. Dental implants are so popular these days that there are well over 350 dental implant manufacturers, with maybe 1,000 implants from which to choose!

Results from an independent Swedish study, with data submitted by more than 800 clinicians, studied three of the most popular brands of dental implants (representing 90% of all implants). Global leader Straumann— the brand used at the Pennsylvania Center for Dental Implants and Periodontics—performed the best in the study.

The researchers randomly selected 427 cases from a population of approximately 25,000 patients who had been treated nine years previously. The researchers found that the odds for a patient succumbing to moderate-to-severe peri-implantitis (a disease causing bone loss around a failed implant) were more than two times higher in patients treated with two other popular manufacturer’s devices as compared to the Straumann brand. Ratios for early failure were nearly EIGHT times higher with other implant brands and up to 60 times higher for later failure.

Bottom line: When researching implant surgeons, be sure to ask the practice what implant system they are using and if their restorative colleague will use original brand parts as well. Clinicians sometimes use the “clone” systems – off brand companies that make parts and pieces “like” the original systems. This may decrease the cost of treatment but at the expense of long-term success. Non-original parts have been shown to fail at an order of magnitude compared to original parts.