Dental Implants? Well, do you know that they play a majorly important role in dentistry. Infact, I wouldn’t be wrong to comment that a large percentage of the total procedures performed in the modern dentistry are almost impossible to carry out without dental implants. This is mostly true for restorative procedures like those where people who have lost their natural tooth or teeth need to get them replaced with the artificial tooth-looking creations. In these procedures, making the artificial tooth is not actually as complicated. It does not require equipment nor skill of more than a dental technologist. The tooth making can be termed as also an artistic venture which a partly skilled person with the right tools can carry out too.
But it is in making the body accept the tooth restoration that most complications arise. The body is at most times highly hesitant in accepting and getting down well with any artificial parts. In fact, sometimes, even natural replacements like those caused by skin grafting or blood transfusion too cause adverse reactions in the body due to the challenge faced by the body in accepting alien elements. By acceptance, it is implied about the integration of that particular part in the body so as to be a part of the body’s normal everyday functioning.
In this similar attempt to restore teeth and bring them back to life and to use them as one would function with their natural teeth that are replaced that the dental implants play an important role. These dental implants are to serve as the roots of your restored artificial teeth, on which your new teeth replacements get anchored to the remaining of your body to make it all function like a singular unit.
Thus, in the making of dental implants, there is a unique challenge in the form of choice of material used to make the implants. The implants have to be, without an option, made of material that the body can adapt to and integrate with. There are not too many materials thus which will be suitable to make the implants. Rather, there are a lot of materials which are far from being acceptable to the body and there is hence no question of integration of them into to body since it would only be an extremely harmful attempt.
There is however one material which has been well accepted by the tissues of the jaw and hence, gradually it does come to function as a unit of the body, complete with the blood vessels and nerves at its service. This material is Titanium, and its discovery in 1952 as a suitable dental implant is credited to a Swede by the name PI Branemark. Other scientists after him too built on the discovery to give us fully functional and easily acceptable dental implants we use today. Averaging at 95%, the acceptance and success rates of these titanium implants is high and hence integration is rather a rule than exception here.
Titanium is only the basic material from which most dental implants are crafted. There have been studies on alternatives but with little success. It is not a new element for the replacement of titanium that may show promising success but rather incorporating elements like aluminium and vanadium with titanium to make improved dental implants.