Dental Implants - Do They Always Have To Be Made From Titanium?

Dental implants play a pivotal role in dental treatment

, specifically in restorative dentistry where people who have lost teeth seek to have them replaced with 'artificial' teeth. As we all know, living without a tooth can make you lose some of your aesthetic appeal; not to mention anything of the inconvenience in chewing food such a tooth loss would subject you to. It is in cognizance of this problem that 'artificial' teeth have been developed.

The dental-implants serve as 'roots' to the 'artificial teeth' - connecting them to the jawbones, and onto the rest of the body. Yet the connection that dental implants provide to the artificial teeth is not just structural. Beyond giving a structural hook for the artificial root to get joined to jawbone, the dental implants also provide 'life support' for the artificial teeth. It is only through the help of the dental implants that the artificial teeth are able to acquire connections to the nervous system (and hence access to sensation), as well as to the body's circulation system - to end up with a fully functional tooth.

But one thing that many people complain about, regarding dental-implants is that they tend to be considerably costly. Examining the reasons as to why the implants tend to be that costly, it emerges that the main one is that they are made from titanium; a rare and precious metal, whose mining and processing is an expensive venture. It is when they are informed about this that many people tend to wonder as to whether dental implants always have to be made from titanium. Couldn't they be made from a cheaper and more easily affordable metal, to make them more affordable to the end users?

As it turns out though, titanium is used, virtually exclusively, as the metal for making dental-implants for one very good reason. That reason becomes very clear when one gets to understand that the body is extremely selective in the 'replacement' body parts it accepts. Thus although the idea of artificially replacing teeth is a very old one indeed, and attempts had been made over the millennia, the replacement teeth of the old tended be more cosmetic than functional. Such teeth had no sensation, and for all purposes and intents, were not really part of the body. They were non-living. You could have such an artificial tooth in your mouth for decades, but it never really integrated with the rest of the body.

It was therefore the discovery that titanium could, within a reasonably short period of time get accepted into the body, and completely integrated, that gave birth to the modern dental-implants.

Attempts have subsequently been made to see if other (cheaper) metals could be found to substitute in the making of dental implants, without much success. So the reason as to why dental implants, at the moment, always have to be made from titanium is because this is the only metal that the body accepts and fully integrates with, over time.

by: James Maloney

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