For Patients

Dear Patient

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Good dental implants are those which always:

• give you the ability to bite and chew as with your normal teeth

• give you a beautiful smile

• don’t give rise to infection, pain or similar

• last for many, many years (twenty, thirty years and longer)

• feel like your own teeth

• don’t let you struggle with unpleasant side effects after surgery i.e. numbness of lips, difficulty to clean etc

 

Bad implants will not last for many years and may exhibit complications which good implants would not give you.

In several news reports, you can read about the “time bomb” in dental implants, which actually is the so-called peri-implantitis.

This is by now a well known disease of which, 15 years ago, the professionals did not know even it existed. It is a bacterial infection which causes the loss of the bone which supports the dental implants. Because bone loss is painless, many people don’t realize that they have the condition.

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International surveys found that about 20% of patients with dental implants are affected and 10% of all implants are affected. It means that a patient with two or three implants may have one with peri-implantitis.

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This news was so shocking to me that I have undertaken, in Oxford over the last ten years, a study of all my patients treated with implants since 1999.

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Most of the patients were not seen by myself but by colleagues from three European Universities – we just organised the patients to come in and be seen by these researchers. I am somewhat proud to be able to publish that, from more than 380 patients with more than 840 implants seen, only 17 implants (2.%) revealed signs of peri-implantitis. The cumulative success rate was 99.17 %.

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And this in the context that I see and treat as a surgeon also some patients with very difficult situations.

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Unfortunately, dentists are uncertain how to treat it. Up ‘til now, the majority of the affected implants will be lost eventually. If that was not bad enough on its own, it has to be said that the situation for the patient after implant failure is worse than the situation before implant treatment begun.

 

The reason for this is that for the implant, a hole has to be drilled into the bone, if then the surrounding bone melts away you can imagine that the anatomical situation is considerably worse. (Please see image in chapter peri-implantitis)