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Introduction
(continued)
My gracious
colleague agreed, and in 1968, I undertook my first dental
implant surgeries. I anesthetized the animals and extracted two worn and
yellow/brown teeth on each side of their lower jaws, replacing them with
blade-shaped implants made of Vitallium—an alloy of cobalt, chromium,
and molybdenum (Figure 0.2). I let these heal for a couple of weeks, then I fastened
onto the implants special gold caps that I wrapped with stainless steel
wire. I attached the wire to the adjacent teeth, and covered the gold
caps with acrylic—a makeshift tooth with which all the animals proved able
to chew. I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more. (Needless to
say, these elderly, ailing animals’ mouths weren’t the most hygienic
oral environments, so I was doubly amazed by what I saw.) Lo and behold,
after 18 months, the implants all still appeared to working well!
Figure 0.2 Diagram of the jaw bone and gum
tissue around a blade-vent implant similar to that used in my original
1968 research.
Since that
article appeared, the technology of implant dentistry has evolved
rapidly. As impressive as implants were in the early 1970s, current
designs and materials offer even more extraordinary reliability. Today
when my patients ask me how long they can expect their implants to last,
I tell them that if I were to place 100 implants the next day (a
superhuman task!), 93 to 94 of those implants would still be in place
and working well in 10 years. And those implants would have the
potential of lasting many more years. I have one patient, for example,
who’s still being well served by an implant I placed in 1975. She’s been
so satisfied with it that when one of her other teeth cracked in 2001,
the first thing she said was that she wanted another implant.
As the advances
in implant technology have taken place, the number of implants placed
every year has climbed. Oral surgeons and other dental professionals
were expected to perform more than 600,000 implant procedures in 2003
with an annual growth rate projected at 15 percent annually over the next decade,
according to the 1999 Medical Data International Report. That’s almost
five times as many as took place in 1986. prev
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