The pressure exerted on your natural tooth roots in your jaw when you bite and chew helps keep your jawbone strong.
When you’ve been missing teeth for a long time, there’s a good chance your jaw bone atrophies, which means you’ve experienced bone loss. This shrinkage can mean you may not have sufficient jawbone support if you decide to replace the missing tooth or teeth with dental implants which fuse with the jawbone.
You may experience shifting of your other teeth as a result. You also may have been told this insufficient bone density means you aren’t a candidate for restorative surgery like dental implants.
Luckily, we can help strengthen weak bone tissue with bone grafts, one method of which you may not have heard of: autogenous bone grafting.
Also known as “autografts,” this form of bone enhancement means we take a tiny piece of bone from a part of your body (often the mouth) and use it to regenerate bone tissue in the needed area where an implant is required.
Various Options
Autografts are used in other surgical reconstruction (like spinal surgery) and are considered the “gold standard” for predictable results. Your body says, “I recognize this material.” It’s live bone tissue that contains your own unique cellular elements. Your body doesn’t have to adapt and build around a foreign material.
At Pennsylvania Center for Dental Implants and Periodontics, we can enhance bone density to support dental implants with autografts and other bone-grafting procedures like xenogenic bone grafts where bone is harvested from a non-living bone of another species, usually a cow.
These procedures all help serve as a framework to enhance jawbone strength, volume and stability in order to help ensure successful dental implant surgery.
For more information on bone grafting techniques and how we can give your jawbone the strength it may need to support long-term dental implants, make an appointment for a consultation today at either our Philadelphia or Ambler office. Referrals aren’t necessary!
