Big & Small, Dental Implants Can Work For You | Columbia, SC

Dentures are a great way to restore the appearance of your smile, but your teeth are for more than just looks. You use your teeth to eat, and they assist you while you are speaking, too.

Dentures alone can only restore a fraction of your original bite force. This can limit the kinds of food you can eat and make foods you can eat more difficult to chew.

Dental implants offer a solution that will revive your smile with a bite force that is close if not equal to what you had with your natural teeth.

Our dentist and staff at Total Dental Care of South Carolina has seen what dental implants (and mini implants) have done for our patients in and around Columbia. We are sure they can help you or someone you love, too.

A lasting solution

Implants are a dental prosthetic. This is a technical way of saying that an implant replaces the root of your tooth.

If you are missing a tooth or need a tooth removed, we can place a dental implant inside your jaw. Modern dental implants are made of titanium for a specific reason — osseointegration.

This is another technical term that means your bones will bond directly to the titanium cylinder. This means your implant will be held in place as securely as the roots of your real teeth.

Implants help in another way as well. The implants stimulate new bone growth where you missing tooth is or would have been. This provides continued support for the teeth around your implant.

This is particularly important if your are already missing teeth. As this article at DearDoctor.com explains, when you lose a tooth, you begin losing bone density in your jaw. Within a year, you can lose up to 25 percent of the bone width where you used to have a tooth.

Without a replacement, you will continue losing bone mass, and that can put other teeth at risk. Each time you lose a tooth, that bone loss gets worse.

We have already explained how osseointegration helps hold your dental implants securely in place. Here’s why that matters.

The DearDoctor.com author surveyed patients who had received partial fixed dentures (dental bridges affixed over the top of the gumline) and patients who had received 1,200 implants combined.

After three years, up to 20 percent of the fixed dentures had failed, and 50 percent had failed after 10 years. By comparison, only 1 percent of the dental implants had failed after 10 years.

That’s security and stability that can’t be beat by any other tooth replacement options.

Dental implant options

Dental implants can help no matter how many teeth your need replaced.

If you are missing one tooth or need multiple teeth replaced in different parts of your mouth, we can fit your dental implant with a dental crown. Our crowns look like real teeth, and they can endure the reasons you use your teeth on a daily basis.

If you have a gap with multiple missing teeth or multiple teeth that need to be replaced, we can create a dental bridge to span that gap. Dental bridges are made of three or more dental crowns, which means they too will look and function like real teeth.

What if you have dentures or need dentures to replace a complete arch of your teeth? That’s no problem either.

We can strategically place multiple implants in your jaw to support your dentures. These dentures are much more stable than dentures held in place by an adhesive.

If you have dentures or know someone who wears dentures, you know that dentures can come loose when you are eating or even when you are speaking. That won’t happen with implant-secured dentures.

A quick note about bone density

We mentioned earlier that your begin losing bone density when you lose a tooth. If you’ve been living without a tooth or teeth for a while, can you still get dental implants? Possibly.

For some patients whose bone density has decreased too much to support dental implant, a bone graft may be possible.

For other patients, we have miniature dental implants. These are comparable in size to toothpicks, which means they can be placed in areas where bone mass can’t support a full-sized implant.

Like regular dental implants, your mini implants can last for decade with proper oral care.

Live better with implants

If you would like to learn more our dental implant or mini implants, our dentist, Dr. Forbes, will be happy to meet with you at our office in Columbia. He can examine your mouth to determine if you can accept regular or miniature implants.

Call Total Dental Care of South Carolina at 803-272-4162 or fill out our online form to make an appointment.

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