If you have lost most of your teeth, or possibly all of them, then you need to seek help. With implant dentistry, our team can secure a full set of replacement teeth, sometimes in only one visit! In today’s blog, your Brooklyn, NY, periodontist and implant expert talks about treating advanced tooth loss with implant dentistry.
The Factors Behind Major Tooth Loss
A single missing tooth is possible due to an untreated cavity or infection. But what causes substantial tooth loss? This could be due to a serious injury to the face or jaw. However, in most cases advanced tooth loss occurs due to periodontitis, the advanced stage of gum disease that actually severs the connective tissues between your teeth and gums. When you have lost several of your teeth, or even most or all of them, you need to seek tooth replacement with dental implants from our team. Otherwise, tooth loss could mean serious trouble for your smile.
The Issues for Your Oral Health and Quality of Life
Missing teeth could lead to misalignment, as surrounding teeth drift due to the gaps in your smile. You could also be severely limited in your meal options, relying on soft foods and depriving your body of essential nutrients and your favorite dishes. For some, issues speaking clearly could happen too. Poor speech capabilities and the large gaps in your smile could also be a source of embarrassment and lead to negative impacts on your social interactions and your overall quality of life. To obtain new teeth and at the same time protect the strength and integrity of your smile and facial structure, you need dental implants.
Planning Replacement
To get started, make an appointment with our team. We will examine your smile with digital x-rays and CT imaging, which allows us to diagnose the cause and severity of your tooth loss with precision and accuracy. We can also assess the strength of your jawbone to ensure it can support dental implants, which are surgically inserted into the smile. Our team will also obtain images that allow us to plan the placement of the posts, find the best angles, positions, and depths to insert them so they can support a complete row of new teeth.
Preparing Your Smile
If your tooth loss has weakened your upper and lower jaw, we could strengthen them with oral surgery to ensure they can support new teeth. For the lower jaw, we can conduct a grafting procedure, adding new structure to the area, either from other parts of your body or from synthetic or donor sources. For the upper jaw, we could offer a sinus lift, raising the sinus floor to uncover new structures to support your new dental implants. We will also extract the last few teeth to pave the way for your new smile.
All-On-Four
For a full set of new teeth in only one visit, we could conduct All-On-Four. With this option, we only use four small dental implants per arch, instead of six to eight of them. This means they require less structure and you may be able to receive them without the need for grafting or a sinus lift. Once in place, these implant posts will act like new roots and be accepted by the body as such, which causes the flow of nutrients to the jaw to resume. Your smile remains intact and your new posts can last for decades or possibly a lifetime! We then connect a set of custom-made ceramic teeth to the posts, which provides a complete smile, one that looks and functions like natural teeth. These are fixed in place, so no need to take them out for cleaning or soaking. You care for them as you would natural teeth!
Healing
Following placement, we could help the area heal faster with the use of Platelet Rich Plasma, injecting a special autoplasm into the jaw that will heal the area around the placement sites faster, so you can return to your normal routine and favorite foods sooner! If you have any questions about how our team will provide a full set of new teeth in one visit with All-On-Four, or about dental implant candidacy, then contact our team today to learn more and get started on your journey to a full smile!
Schedule a Visit for Implant Dentures at Brooklyn Periodontics
Treatment can help you smile with confidence and safeguard your oral health and bite function. For more information on treating advanced tooth loss, please call Brooklyn Periodontics & Implantology in Brooklyn, NY at (718) 444-3800 today.
