Osseous Surgery

Sav­ing Your Teeth and Smile with Osseous Surgery

Osseous (or bone) surgery is a type of sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure that involves reshap­ing the jaw­bone around the teeth under the gum. Although peri­odon­tal infec­tion can dam­age your gums which you can see, most of the dam­age from peri­odon­tal dis­ease actu­ally affects the under­ly­ing bone which you can not see. As harm­ful bac­te­ria, plaque and cal­cu­lus develop under the gums and around the teeth, deep gum pock­ets can form as the loss of gum attach­ment to the roots of the teeth and loss of bone around the teeth occur.

Once the bone con­tour is dam­aged, the result­ing irreg­u­lar bone con­tours will pre­vent the gums from lying down flat or as close to the bone as pos­si­ble, result­ing in deeper gum pocket depths which can lead to prob­lems for the health of your teeth. Also, if too much bone is lost, teeth may become loose and need to be extracted.

Osseous Surgery

One goal of peri­odon­tal treat­ment is to reduce the gum pocket depths so as to make future peri­odon­tal main­te­nance treat­ments like scal­ing eas­ier to accom­plish with bet­ter results. This goal means a reduc­tion in the risk of future gum and bone loss due to peri­odon­tal dis­ease. Infected gum tis­sue is removed and uneven bone tis­sue is reshaped.

Reshap­ing irreg­u­lar bone with osseous surgery allows the gum tis­sue to heal closer to the bone in the areas around the teeth reduc­ing the gum pocket depths and reduc­ing the risk of future fur­ther bone and tis­sue loss around the teeth.

Dur­ing osseous surgery, our peri­odon­tists will care­fully fold back the gum tis­sue, remove the disease-causing bac­te­ria and cal­cu­lus from around the roots of your teeth, reshape the irreg­u­lar bone sur­faces, and repo­si­tion the gum tissue.