Ridge Preservation

Pre­vent­ing Bone and Soft Tis­sue Loss with Ridge Preservation

When tooth extrac­tion is required, re-absorption or loss of the under­ly­ing bone will result as well as loss of the soft tis­sue height in the area. This can be espe­cially prob­lem­atic to patients seek­ing den­tal implants, den­tal bridges and other restorations.

For patients who wish to have future implants in an area, bone loss can change an easy implant case to a dif­fi­cult implant case. A dif­fi­cult implant case means more time, more appoint­ments and more cost to have an implant placed in an area. The more bone height and width that is avail­able, the eas­ier the implant case is, assum­ing there are no com­pli­cat­ing med­ical issues.

Also loss of soft tis­sue height due to the loss of the under­ly­ing bone height makes an area more dif­fi­cult to restore with an aes­thetic crown on an implant or an aes­thetic bridge on nat­ural teeth or implants.

Ridge Preser­va­tion and Den­tal Implants

Ridge preser­va­tion is a pro­ce­dure per­formed imme­di­ately after a tooth extrac­tion that can min­i­mize the amount of bone loss and soft tis­sue loss to pre­vent the irre­versible shrink­age of the jaw bone that will sup­port a new implant and its restoration.

Care­ful man­age­ment of extrac­tion sock­ets after tooth extrac­tion with the addi­tion of bone graft mate­r­ial in the extrac­tion socket pre­vents or min­i­mizes unsightly soft tis­sue and bone loss and pro­vides a bet­ter cos­metic out­come for tooth replacement.

Espe­cially for patients who want implants now or may want implants in the future, it is for these rea­sons that the ridge preser­va­tion pro­ce­dure is highly rec­om­mended in cases where implants can not be imme­di­ately placed at the time of tooth extraction.