Bone Grafting for Implants

Bone grafting or augmentation simply involves placing filler bone carefully in position to allow and encourage your own natural bone to grow around it.

When a tooth is removed from the jaw, the bone begins to recede as the tooth root is no longer there to keep the bone in function. Bone loss can continue through time, often resulting in facial changes such as sunken cheeks where teeth have been lost from the back of the mouth and sunken lips when teeth have been lost towards the front. The sooner an implant is placed after tooth removal, the lower the likelihood of augmentation being needed

Types of Bone Grafting:

There are many ways in which bone grafting can be done.

Sometimes it is as simple as collecting bone when preparing an implant site and then reusing the bone for grafting purposes. Whenever we can use the patient’s own bone for repairs or additions, we will get the best results
Very often, we can use "bone in a bottle" to do bone grafting for dental implants. This bone is specially prepared from cadavers or other sources and used to get the patient’s own bone to grow into the repair site. It is very effective and very safe. Sometimes synthetic materials can be used to stimulate bone formation and sometimes we even use factors from your own blood to accelerate and promote bone formation in graft areas.

. In extreme cases, bone can be harvested from areas inside and outside the mouth. Inside the mouth the bone is usually harvested from area behind the molars or from the chin .Outside the mouth, the most common area is the hip. Needless to say, when this type of bone graft is done, the patient needs to be hospitalized when the   physician actually removes bone from the hip and the implantologist places it in the appropriate areas of mouth.