When you lose natural teeth, your jaw will lose mass and density. This complication makes placing dental implants difficult. To strengthen the jaw and ensure your dental implants can last for years to come, our team can offer ridge augmentation. In today’s blog, your Santa Rosa , CA, oral surgeons talk about bone grafting and sinus lifts.
The Causes of Ridge Weakness
How does your jaw lose mass and density? Well, when we lose our teeth, the body will register the missing tooth root. In response, your body stops sending doses of calcium and phosphorus to the jaw around the lost roots. Without these nutrients, the bone tissue begins to break down, which leads to further tooth loss and over enough time, a prematurely aged appearance. While dental implants can help prevent the loss of mass and density, as the body accepts them as natural roots, there needs to be enough bone tissue to support them. Which is why we may prescribe a grafting or sinus lift procedure.
The Grafting and Sinus Lift Procedures
To begin, we will obtain digital x-ray and CT images of your smile to assess the state of your jawbone and to plan the treatment in detail. We will offer local anesthesia and sedation to help you enter a calm and relaxed state, with little to no memory of the procedure. For the ridge augmentation, we will take tissues from your jaw, hip, or possibly your knee and apply them to the weakened areas of the smile. We expose the bone so these new tissues can bond with them and fortify your smile. We could also discuss synthetic and donor tissues as well.
With sinus lifts, a procedure reserved for the upper portion, we will simply lift the sinus floor to uncover new bone tissue. This can provide a place to insert multiple dental implants, so you can move forward with tooth replacement.
Placing Dental Implants
Typically, these procedures are used to prepare your smile for implant dentures. We will place as little as three or four posts, connected by a titanium bar, or as many as six per arch. We then connect abutments to them and attach your denture, so you have a complete smile again.
If you have any questions about ridge augmentations or about sinus lifts and implant dentistry, then contact our team today to learn more.
Talk To Your Santa Rosa, CA Oral Surgeon About Your Tooth Loss
Our team wants to make sure your smile is strong enough to receive new teeth. If you would like to learn more about restoring the strength of your smile, then contact your Santa Rosa, CA, oral surgeons by calling (707)545-4625.
