Prevention and Treatment of Peri-implant Disease Dr. Emil Svoboda

Prevention and Treatment of Peri-implant Disease Dr. Emil Svoboda

Introduction: Treatment involving dental implants has raised the bar on the quality of service that dentists can provide for their patients. With dental implants, clinicians can often reconstruct an entire dentition, even when nature and all other dental services have already failed. Dentists can also replace ailing teeth without damage to adjacent teeth, and rebuild the posterior teeth to support and protect anterior teeth. Indeed, despite depleted oral health conditions, implant based treatment can provide a functional and esthetic result, unattainable by other means.

Peri-implant disease is a serious treatment complication, that can result in premature treatment failure. In its early stages, peri-implant disease may appear as peri-implant mucositis, which is mainly a soft tissue complication, and it may progress to cause the progressive destruction of the hard tissues that support the implant. This later stage is called peri-implantitis. Treatment complications and failure that result from peri- implant disease can be costly for both the patient and their dentist. There appears to be a growing prevalence of peri-implantitis. Perhaps, this may have to do with the many dental implants already in the mouth, and the increasing number of implants placed every year. The prevalence of peri-implant disease is known to increase with the amount of time dental implants are in in the mouth.

According to the literature, there does not appear to be a definitive treatment for peri-implantitis. This disease seems to have many contributing factors, that include patient related factors and industry related factors. My below discussion will focus on factors that relate to the currently prevalent prosthesis installation techniques. My discussion will focus upon making intra-oral prosthesis installation safer. The proposed installation protocol is sensitive to model inaccuracy and the “Gingival Effects”. The Gingival Effects have been discovered and described by the author…