Bone Grafting for Dental Implants

One of the requirements for using a dental implant to replace a missing tooth is the presence of enough healthy jawbone. When you lose a tooth, the jawbone in that area begins to shrink because it no longer has a tooth to support. In some cases, the bone shrinks to a width and height that cannot support a dental implant. This does not prevent you from replacing your missing tooth with an implant—it simply requires some preparation and building up of the shrunken bone which is done by bone grafting for the placement of  dental Implants.

The purpose of a bone graft is to improve the missing tooth site so that you can have an implant restoration. It transforms an area of bone that was unacceptable into a healthy foundation for the dental implant.

There are many different types of bone grafting, and they all serve the same purpose: to improve the long-term success of your dental implant. Some bone grafts, called socket preservation grafts, take place at the time of the tooth extraction to help conserve the bone width and height and prevent shrinkage. As the name implies, they preserve the socket. Other grafts, called ridge augmentation, work to build up a ridge that has already shrunk. The material used in bone grafting procedures can come from a lab (synthetic graft), from a donor (allograft), or from your own body (autograft). These materials stimulate your body to produce natural bone to grow into the matrix provided by the grafting material.