Can people with gum disease have dental implant treatment?

By Dr. Marco Benigni
Specialist Oral Surgeon

GUM DISEASE AND DENTAL IMPLANTS

Patients with uncontrolled gum disease should not be given dental implant treatment.

In these cases, the gum disease that is affecting their teeth and gums will also affect the implants. 

And we never want to add problems to existing problems.

If a patient has very bad gum disease, they need to get that under control before we can place the implants.

Gum disease: Am I still a candidate for dental implants?

One big problem that we occasionally see is with patients who reach the age of 40 or 50 who have never learnt how to properly look after their teeth.

Maybe they require a large number of extractions.

These are difficult cases because we could potentially have the patient follow up with the periodontist and with the hygienist about how to work on their oral hygiene.

And then we would need to see progress before we can actually make up our mind and say: “Okay, you’re ready for the implants now.”

CAN YOU HAVE TOOTH IMPLANTS WITH GUM DISEASE?

But, with patients like this, just because they want implants doesn’t mean that it’s responsible for us to agree to treat them.

You can take the teeth out but what then? Should we perform implants treatment?

If we were to place them, there would then be a tremendous amount of work to do afterwards…

… because we would have to teach them how to do something that they have never managed to do before – with a completely new “device” in their mouth, which is not the same at all as their old natural teeth.

Can you have dental implants with gum disease UK?

In these quite extreme cases, we don’t have time to work with the patient beforehand, to teach and guide them and to basically prepare them for the implant cases.

As dental professionals, we want to improve the oral health of our patients and, as a consequence, improve their general health.

A healthy mouth helps towards a healthy everything.