Size matters

Take a look at the panoramic radiograph of the patient in figure 1. This lady was treated over 10 years ago for a failing upper dentition. The treatment involved strategic extraction, provisional bridgework on the remaining teeth and serially placed implants coupled with bilateral sinus grafts before eventually making the final bridgework. Is this a typical dental implant patient?

Well the answer is of course not. For the vast majority of patients dental implants are used to restore one or two missing teeth, often purely for functional purposes.

In fact replacing missing posterior teeth is becoming more and more the most frequent use of the dental implant. This is because people are living longer and posterior teeth, often treated initially for caries at a young age, go beyond their repairable limits, whilst replacing posterior teeth is becoming simpler. Gone are the days where every case with limited available bone needed some sort of bone graft in order to place a long dental implant. This is not to say that all implants can be placed with ease but more that, with the advent of predictable short implants, replacing posterior teeth is not so limited by anatomy.