When your teeth are on the way out

If you have reached the point at which some of your teeth are starting to fail, it may be time to throw in the towel on treatments to try and make them last longer and go for extraction and replacement. Many people are tempted to forget the second bit and live with the gaps, especially if the gaps are at the sides and back of the mouth where they are less visible.

But at Ikon Dental Suite, we don’t recommend living with gaps for long. We think it is better to fill them with dental implants in West London and we have sound reasons why.

Your jawbone after tooth loss

When you lose teeth, you lose not only something you need to bite and chew with but you also lose an important transmitter that emits signals that tell your jawbone to keep renewing its cells. Every time your teeth come together, the resultant vibrations go down into the tooth root and out into the surrounding bone.

As they jiggle about, the bone cells are stimulated into renewing themselves. When the jiggling stops, the cells don’t just not bother to make new cells, they actively start to dissolve the bone, thinking it is no longer needed for chewing.

Wearing dentures or having fixed bridgework is not enough to send these signals into the bone, so it recedes below them, becoming thinner and smaller. The neighbouring teeth can become loose too and even topple into the gap and fall out.

Keeping a strong jawbone

Dental implants in West London help preserve the integrity of the jawbone by replacing tooth roots and transmitting the required signals into the bone. Strong, healthy jawbones make the face look younger. As well as being able to eat whatever you like with dental implants in West London, you also look more youthful and healthy.

Find out more

The best way to find out more is to book a consultation with our implant dentist. They can talk you through the procedure and also take a look at your jawbone and see if it is strong enough to have implants, or whether you will need some preparatory work to build up the bone beforehand.

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