Dental Implants

Hello, I'm Dr. Joseph Sutton. I'm a dentist here at Newport Family Dental Care. I'd like to tell you a little bit about dental implants. And dental implants can be a little confusing, but really, all a dental implant is is artificial root to a tooth. Okay? Just like hip implants, or any other implants, it is actually a little piece of titanium that goes down under the gums, and the bone is allowed to heal over that. So that's the artificial root to a dental implant. And with that artificial root, we can do different things for missing teeth. So dental implants are really used to replace missing teeth. So, once our artificial root is placed down below the gums, we can add teeth on top of it. We can add the implant-supported dentures on top of it. There's just a lot of different options we have for patients. Patients that are missing teeth, either it be one tooth, multiple teeth, can all benefit from dental implants. The traditional way to replace teeth would be bridges, or removable dentures, or dentures, but by being able to replace that root under the gums, we can now put crowns on top of that root, we can attach bridges to it, we can attach dentures to it. So anybody that's missing a tooth could benefit from having a dental implant. How to you know if you are a candidate for a dental implant is you need to have tissues around where you want the implant placed evaluated. They need to be healthy. And you need to have enough healthy adequate bone in that area. If those two things are a go, then you're a good candidate. And if they're not, it doesn't mean you're not a candidate for a dental implant. It just means you might have to have some other treatments prior to getting an implant placed, such as getting any disease taken away from the area, or what we call bone augmentation, or we where we get bone to grow in that area so you have room to place the dental implant.