15 Questions we often get asked about Dental Implants

7. How long have you been placing dental implants for?

Answer:

Kenilworth Dental Practice is Creating a Centre of Excellence for Dental Implant Treatment. Overall, we’ve been placing dental implants since 2004.

8. Who places dental implants at Kenilworth Dental Practice and how many does he place each year?

Answer:

Implant Dentistry is more complex and therefore beyond general ‘every day’ dentistry, so to meet your needs we firmly believe in a team approach.

You’ll see two experienced clinicians along your journey, as well as senior support staff.

Practice owner and principal dentist, Dr. Arjun Kachhala is experienced in diagnosing complex dental problems, so he’s the first clinician that you’ll see for your detailed assessment.

He has over 20 years of experience in diagnosing and providing solutions to patients with multiple simultaneous and complex dental needs (e.g. involving various combinations of severe gum disease, worn teeth, missing teeth, regular cracked fillings and / or regular tooth infections etc.).

Once a proper diagnosis has been established and a treatment plan has been agreed jointly with Dr. Arjun Kachhala, you’ll then be referred to our gentle implant dentist Dr. Srinivas Arun for the implant placement procedure itself.

Our learned & experienced implant dentist, Dr. Arun is an exceptionally talented, skilled and gifted individual. In fact he’s a bit of an implant geek so you’ll be in excellent hands!

He’s been placing dental implants since 2015 and now places around 50 implants each year.

He’s very highly regarded by the rest of our team and was head hunted to finally become a valued member of our team in 2021!

Our patient feedback is always very positive and consistently shows that Dr. Arun is popular because of his reassuring, gentle, pain-free and refreshingly honest approach.

People often call and ask us for him by name due to personal recommendations!

Click here to read more about our Implant Dentist, Dr. Srinivas Arun.

9. Do implants ever fail? What is your success rate?

Answer:

According to published research, and much like any other medical procedure (e.g. hip replacement) published research shows that dental implants can sometimes fail. It is not ever realistic to assume that all medical or dental treatments will always last ‘forever’.

Success rates in medicine are generally measured over a 5 year period.

Accordingly, we carefully audit all our success rates ongoing and for dental implants we measure ourselves against a general UK national average of approximately 85-90% success.

Although we’ve been placing implants for a long time, our success rate for dental implants over the past 5 complete years is greater than 99%!

In other words, less than 1% of our dental implants have failed over the last 5 years. We have good, steady, long term success with the overwhelming majority of our dental implants and we continue to moniter this ongoing.

10. Why do implants fail?

Five Answers:

According to research, whenever failures occur, there may be more than one reason. It may also be many years before a failure becomes apparent.

This is why we take our time to thoroughly assess and diagnose everyone properly at the beginning-we want to maximise your chance of your implant lasting for a long time. Additionally, as we are very proud of our 99% success rates we want to ensure it remains that way! There are many possible reasons for failure:

• Smoking (including ex-smokers) is one of the main reasons for failure. According to research, the general success rate drops significantly in smokers to 70-75% or less.
• Poor oral hygiene and gum disease is probably ‘the’ main reason for failure of a dental implant. Poor daily plaque control causes gum disease (i.e. not brushing teeth thoroughly, or often enough or for long enough). Inadequate or irregular interdental tooth-brushing (not cleaning between teeth properly) also causes gum disease and weakens the gums. This can cause implants and teeth to become loose and ultimately to fail. Research also shows that implants eventually fail more often in people who have previously had gum disease, even if gum disease is currently ‘stable’.

Some research suggests that the following factors may also limit the long term success of dental implants, potentially ultimately causing them to fail:

• Poorly controlled or undiagnosed diabetes
• Excessive or frequent daily alcohol intake
• Excessive or frequent daily processed sugar or poor quality diet in general

Whilst we never give any certainties, to maximise the chances of long-term implant success, we recommend leading a healthy lifestyle, free of smoking, excessive alcohol or sugar, with a well-balanced nutritious diet and with excellent daily oral hygiene and excellent daily plaque control.

11. How do I look after my implant once the treatment is finished?

Answer:

To maintain the health of the implant, you must avoid smoking and excessive alcohol. You must also practice excellent daily oral hygiene and plaque removal.

This means meticulous tooth brushing and also cleaning thoroughly every day between all your teeth. To support your gum health, you must also report for regular uninterrupted 4 monthly hygiene examinations (on average).

Poor daily plaque control causes Gum Disease; this weakens the gums. This ultimately will cause dental implants to become loose and to fail. This is all preventable!

12. Do you offer any guarantee period?

Answer:

Yes! We’re Proud and Confident in what we do and we now offer a THREE year guarantee on all our dental implants from the day they’re placed!

We cannot offer any guarantees beyond 3 years because the biological reasons for failure could be due to any one of many multiple factors beyond our careful planning and thus totally out of our control.

In order to maintain this 3 year guarantee, it is essential to attend the practice for regular Hygiene appointments as recommended. Without following our strict advice on regular Hygiene attendance & without committing to proper thorough daily brushing and plaque removal at home, our 3 year guarantee becomes invalid.

13. I feel like I may be too old for this, is there an age limit?

Answer:

It’s never too late.

Most of our patients are in their 60’s and 70s.

The general overall age range of patients that we’ve seen range from those in their 20’s who may have lost a tooth at the front of the mouth through trauma, all the way up to patients that are well into their mid-80s. Our oldest ever patient was 93 and our youngest ever was 18.

There isn’t any age restriction.

Your decision just depends on how much of a difference you personally feel that it would make to you to have a secure set of teeth which will enable you to properly chew or bite into food once again or to smile confidently.

How much of a difference would it make to you to get rid of loose dentures or to be able to eat the range of foods that you’ve perhaps been craving for a long time?

14. How long does it all take?

Answer:

On average, a dental implant takes 4-5 months to fully integrate into the bone before the tooth/teeth on top (implant retained crown/s or bridge/s) can be manufactured and fitted.

From your first enquiry through our patient coordinator to having teeth finally fitted, it takes on average 5-6 months (if you include time for assessment, diagnosis, scans and laboratory manufacturing time).

If you need to have a tooth removed first, you should also know that around 8-12 weeks healing time is ideal before a dental implant can be placed (it is rare to be able to place a dental implant immediately after a tooth is removed).

If a dental implant is placed too soon into a site where a natural tooth was recently removed, there is a greater chance of failure. Similarly, scientific data also shows that not waiting for a dental implant to fully integrate (4-5 months) and rushing to manufacture an implant retained crown or bridge will also lead to implant failure/s.

So, whilst the timescales may seem unappealing, instead of rushing we stick closely to published scientific research to govern our processes and this also helps us maintain a high success rate.

15. Before people actually go for dental implants, what do they tell you?

Three Answers:

Below is a short summary of all the main reasons that people have ever told us they wanted to go for dental implants:

The main reason seems to be for ‘chewability’!

Our feedback shows quite clearly that having to restrict daily food and not being able to enjoy a full menu choice (as compared to the ‘’past’’) is the main factor for many of our patients.

Many also often tell us they’ve worn removable partial or full dentures for many years.

Our new patients often grumble of gradually becoming very fed up of their dentures becoming loose and of having to think about where they place their food in their mouth in case their denture comes out!

Those that don’t have dentures complain of having to restrict what they can eat altogether, often avoiding hard or chewy foods such as meat, nuts, fruit and vegetables.

Not being able to chew or bite properly, having to restrict food choices or suffering with poor fitting loose dentures can affect general nutrition, quality of life, self-confidence and in the past had apparently even prevented some of our patients from wanting to eat out during social occasions!