Why Dental Implants Fail

Hello, this is Dr. Sasan Khodabakhsh. I often get asked why do dental implants fail, you know, although that dental implants have a 95 to 98% success rate at our facility and that's pretty common nationwide, they do sometimes who failed. And sometimes we never really know. But usually we can categorize that into three common areas. The first area is health history, how healthy is that patient for patient who comes into our office, you know, 35 year old healthy male or female with no pre existing conditions are usually tend to have a much higher success rate, they tend to be in the 98 percentile? Now, if a person who comes to our office with uncontrolled diabetes , immunosuppression through chemotherapy or a patient who has history of being a smoker for the last 10 or 20 years, they tend to have a lower success rate, usually in the, 70 to 85 percentile. One of the other main reasons of why implants can fail is mechanical stress placed on a dental implant. Now, a dental implant has three components, usually you have the implant component, which is the actual screws that's inside of the bone. Once it's placed, you have what's called an abutment, which is a connection between the implant and the restoration, then you have the crown itself that goes over the abutment, the crown usually is either cemented or screw retained. In our office, we usually like to have one screw retained because they're healthier and they last longer. So those are common reasons why dental implant can fail. If one of those parts are stressed placed on them that's too great. You get to see some bone loss around the implant for example, or one of the screws like you know, the connection between the implant abutment and the implant itself can fail. So we want to account for all of this before we do this surgery to make sure that we have a great result and a great outcome for the patient. Last but not least, the patient's oral hygiene You know, when they come into our office you know, if they have advanced bone loss, you know, if they have poor oral hygiene and we want to discuss with the patient, you know, what, what is causing that poor oral hygiene? Is it just lack of brushing lack of flossing of your teeth, or is there's just something else going on. So those are discussion we want to have with them before we do any type of surgery. Because you know, just like the patient we want this you know to have a high success rate. Once you have an implant place and you have it restored requires a lot higher maintenance than just having your natural teeth because you know you can still get plaque around the implant restoration and we want to make sure that you know that is addressed. So we discuss all of this with the patient ahead of time. If you have more questions, please visit our website at summitpointdental.com or feel free to give us a call to schedule for a free consultation.