Dental implants are one of the most amazing advances in dental technology. They allow us to permanently replace diseased, damaged and missing teeth with an extremely high success rate.
Beyond national statistics, we know from personal experience that dental implants have a high satisfaction rate among our patients in our clinic.
But even the best procedures like implants can have the potential for complications, whether it’s the prosthetic portion of your implant or the underlying titanium screw.
It is important to distinguish between early implant failure and late implant failure. Early implant failure often occurs during the installation process and is often due to failed osseointegration. Because we are extremely careful and systematic in our implantation process, our dental team is skilled at preventing such failures. We carefully screen and prepare candidates to ensure they have the ideal environment for their implants to succeed.
Delayed implant failure can come years after you have a functioning dental implant and may result from a change in implant fit (sometimes bone loss), repeated chewing force that causes the implant to break down, or peri-implantitis.
If your implant is damaged, the first thing to do is to call our clinic as soon as possible. Even if it’s out of hours or on the weekend, leaving a message will help us get you to the office quickly to resolve the issue.
Second, keep all parts of the implant you have. While it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to use them to repair the implant, examining them can help us determine what’s causing the implant failure.
Then try to keep your mouth as clean as possible until we look at something.
When you come to our clinic, we will assess the situation and offer you some options for repair. If we can save the implant, we will. If it needs to be completely removed, we will completely remove the remaining parts of the abutment with special tools.
At this point, we will carefully examine the gum and bone tissue to see if it has been compromised and contributed to the failure. If not, we will look at replacing the implant.
One of the great things about dental implants is that many of them are warranted by the manufacturer, which means they can cover the cost of the repair if they fail.
