There are many benefits to dental implants: their beautiful appearance, their high success rate, their lifetime durability, and their ease of maintenance. But perhaps the most important benefit of dental implants is that they are good for your oral health.
Here’s how dental implants help you keep good oral health.
Don’t Lean on Teeth for Support
One of the important things about dental implants is that they support themselves. A dental implant is anchored in your jawbone, similar to your natural teeth. Other tooth replacement options like dental bridges and partial dentures rely on your natural teeth for support. This puts extra strain on your teeth, can make them harder to clean, and cause other effects that can shorten the life of your remaining teeth.
But dental implants don’t do that, which helps your teeth to stay healthy.
Maintains Your Jawbone and Gums
Another benefit of dental implants is that they stimulate your jawbone. Like natural teeth, dental implants put pressure on your jawbone, which tells your body that the bone is still needed. Without that pressure, the body removes the bone as part of its natural efforts to conserve and reuse resources.
The loss of jawbone causes your gums to collapse, too. After all, your gums are supported by your bones, and as the bones go, so do the gums.
When your jawbone diminishes, your body can remove some of the support from around adjacent teeth. This makes those teeth more vulnerable to trauma.
The bone and gums stimulated by your dental implant help protect adjacent teeth.
Keeps Pressure off Your Gums
Our gums aren’t really suited to supporting bite force. The gums are supposed to enfold and protect teeth, but it’s up to the bones to do the support work. So when you get traditional dentures, you are trying to make your gums do work they’re not well suited for.
So it’s not surprising that people experience many gum-related problems because of dentures. Especially common is sore or tender gums from wearing dentures. Sometimes people get used to dentures and the problem improves. However, many people find that wearing dentures all day always leads to soreness.
But with dental implants, you can protect your gums from this excess force. Implants direct the force into your bones so that your gums don’t have to bear it. This is true whether you have a single tooth dental implant or an implant denture. Of course, some dentures, called implant-retained dentures, just use implants to stabilize dentures. Some of the force goes to the implants, but much of it still rests on your gums.
Choose Dental Implants for Health
If you have lost or are facing the loss of one or more teeth, there are many tooth replacement options. When you consider your options, prioritize your oral health and choose dental implants.
If you would like to learn more about the benefits of dental implants in Columbia, SC, please call (803) 781-9090 today for an appointment with implant dentist Dr. Adam Hahn at Smile Columbia Dentistry.
