Bone Grafting

Bone grafts are procedures done to reconstruct missing bone in the jaw in order to place a dental implant. Implants require a certain amount of bone to be available to keep them covered up, protected from the oral environment, and provide stability to them. We can do something called a bone graft to rebuild that bone, so then we can come back and then place an implant a little later. We typically use bone that comes in a jar, and it's had all the organic portion removed, and it's really just the mineral part of the bone. And the patient's own bone cells use that as a matrix to then create the patient's own bone. Sometimes if the graft isn't too large, or there's not that much bone missing, we can actually place a dental implant and graft at the same time. But sometimes in patients who are missing multiple teeth and we're trying to place multiple implants, or if they have a lot of severe bone loss, those grafts will be larger. And there will be a little bit more swelling. We have to manipulate the tissue a little bit more. The initial recovery period is a little prolonged, a few days, just simply because of the complexity and the larger size. The overall healing time you find doesn't change a whole lot.