Dentures

I have been in dentures for almost 25 years. I’ve never liked my smile. A lady in my church choir just got dental implants and they look much more beautiful than my smile. Is it too late for me to get a pretty smile with dental implants?

Julie

Dear Julie,

I have some good news for you. It is never too late to get a beautiful smile. Because you have been in completely removable dentures for at least a couple of decades, you are probably finding it challenging to keep your dentures in at this point. This is because when your teeth were first removed, your body recognized you no longer had any teeth roots in your jawbone that it needed to support. Because of that, it starts to resorb the minerals in your jawbone in order to use those minerals in other places in your body. That has the side effect of slowly shrinking your jawbone. Eventually there is not enough of your jawbone left to keep your dentures in place. In dental circles, this is known as facial collapse.

Getting dental implants prevents that because your body recognized that there are implants there and interprets them as teeth roots. Because of that it leaves your minerals in place. That also keeps your jawbone intact. You’ve been in dentures long enough to have lost a significant amount of bone. Without that bone, you won’t be able to support the implants. The good news is that there is a solution for that.

You can have a bone grafting procedure done. This will build up the bone you’ve lost and enable you to get those implants to support your dentures.

Now, for the thing that might be painful to hear. You could have had a beautiful smile even with removable dentures (at least until facial collapse kicked in). Whether or not your smile is beautiful, in this case, has more to do with the cosmetic skill of the dentist than anything else.

When getting implant supported dentures, you want to look for two things in the dentist you choose to do the procedure. The first is post-doctoral training in dental implants. Dental school alone is not enough. The second thing is great cosmetic skills. Look at their smile gallery to see what type of results they get creating beautiful smiles.

This blog is brought to you by a caring Naples Dentist, Dr. Andrea Cameron.