If you have lost one or more of your natural teeth or are about to have a tooth extracted, you should consider having dental implants put in. Implants are easily the number one method of tooth restoration available to patients today, offering many benefits.

These benefits include:

• A great new smile!
• Eliminating speech limitations caused by tooth loss.
• Eliminating difficulties chewing caused by missing teeth.
• Preventing discomforts associated with removable dentures.
• A 99% success rate and new teeth that last for decades!

But did you also realize that dental implants do much to help promote good oral health over the long term? Here are 5 ways it does that.

1. Dental Implants Are Easy to Care For

The first way that dental implants help you improve your own oral health is by making it easier to do your daily oral hygiene routine.

With dental bridges and removable dentures, food particles will get stuck in the dental appliances, making it hard to brush and floss properly. But with dental implants, brushing and flossing can be done exactly the same way as with natural teeth.

You need no specialized dental tools to make that happen either – just an ordinary toothbrush, toothpaste, floss – and throw in there a good antiseptic mouthwash.

When dental hygiene becomes more difficult, cavities and gum disease are often the ultimate results. When it is made as easy as possible, these kinds of oral problems become far less likely to occur.

2. Dental Implants Help Protect Other Teeth

With dental bridges, you have to cut into the enamel of adjacent teeth (to a certain extent) in order to set up support props and the like that help keep the bridges in place.

That’s not at all the case when it comes to dental implants. Your implants won’t negatively impact nearby natural teeth in any way, shape, or form.

In fact, dental implants look, feel, and function just like “real” teeth! They mimic natural teeth in practically every conceivable way, and therefore if natural teeth will not negatively impact other natural teeth – neither will modern dental implants do so.

3. Implants Also Do No Harm to Your Gums

Removable dentures often rub harshly against your gum tissue, sometimes even causing painful sores and bleeding. This happens because your mouth grows and changes over time, while your dentures do not. This creates a misfit, to a degree, and eventually creates the necessity of having a new set of removable dentures made (every few years.)

On the other hand, dental implants are set in your mouth exactly like ordinary teeth. There is no plastic denture tray to rub against gum tissue.

Even if you have all or most of your teeth replaced with dental implants, it still will not cause this kind of problem. The reason is that all-on-4 implants are set on titanium implant rods so that they are sturdy, not shifting in your mouth like their removable counterparts can.

Also, gum tissue encircles implants exactly like regular teeth. By contrast, an empty space will allow gum tissue to sink in and may allow a gum infection to start up in the empty socket where the missing tooth used to be.

4. Implants Help Reverse Alveolar Bone Loss

When you lose a tooth, there is no longer the pressure placed on the underlying bone tissue (alveolar bone tissue) that was there before when you used that tooth for chewing.

This lack of pressure causes the bone tissue to shrink. It is actually absorbed back into the body because the body sees it as no longer necessary. You can easily lose half or more of the bone mass below a tooth after it is gone for years, and a substantial amount of bone shrinkage occurs within a few months of tooth loss.

But dental implants restore the natural pressure that should be on alveolar bone tissue. This stops bone resorption and actually helps bone to regrow. (In some cases, you may need bone grafts initially, however, to support the implant rod.)

5. Dental Implants Can’t Get Cavities!

In one respect, dental implants promote good oral health even more than natural teeth – implants are not susceptible to caries (cavities).

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t brush and care for your implants, though. Bacteria and food particles can still cling to the surface of an implant just like a natural tooth. You don’t want that to happen because it could spread from there to other parts of your mouth. And you don’t want the gums around your implant to get gum disease for the lack of flossing and other dental care.

You want to see your periodontist at least once or twice a year if you use dental implants. Initially after surgery, you will want to see him or her a few times, but then it becomes rather low-maintenance. But low maintenance does not equal no maintenance. Dental implants require the same kind of oral hygiene as ordinary teeth – no more, no less.

To learn more about dental implants and their many benefits or to schedule a consultation with an experienced local periodontist, contact Ormond Beach Periodontics & Implant Dentistry today!