What Is The Material That Dental Implants Are Made From?

Dental implants play a very important role in dentistry

. Indeed it wouldn't be too far off the mark to say that a huge percentage of the procedures performed in modern dentistry wouldn't be possible without the dental implants. This is especially so for restorative procedures - like where people who lose their natural teeth have them replaced by 'tooth-looking' artificial creations. Now in these types of situations, making the teeth-looking structures themselves, while seemingly complicated, is not really hard. It doesn't even usually any more a skilled person that a dental technologist. It is, for all purposes and intents, an artistic venture, which anyone presented with the right tools should be able to get done.

It is in getting the body to 'accept' the teeth restorations that a problem arises. The body is usually very 'hesitant' in accepting artificial parts. Indeed, even natural replacements (like the blood that is transfused or skin grafts where they are employed) typically find quite a bit of a challenged getting 'accepted' by the body. By acceptance, we mean integration into the body, so that the restorative parts can acquire 'life' and the same functionality as the parts they are replacing.

It is at this point then, in attempting to get the teeth restorations to have 'life' and the same function as the natural teeth they are replacing, that the dental implants come in. These dental implants are supposed to serve as the 'roots' to the teeth replacements - on which the teeth replacements get anchored to the rest of the body - which functions as a unit.

In making the dental-implants, then, we are faced with a unique challenge: choice of material from which to make the implants. What is needed is a material that the body can 'accept' and integrate with. Not many materials are like this. There are in fact some materials which far from being accepted by the body and integrated, end up being harmful when an attempt is made to introduce them internally.

But there is one material that has been shown to be well accepted by the tissues in the jaw so that eventually, it comes to function as a part of body: complete with nerves and blood vessels at its service. The material in question is Titanium, and its discovery as having these characteristic is credited to a Swede by the name PI Branemark. It is a discovery that he made in 1952, and on which other scientists after him built, to give us the fully function and easily accepted dental implants that we have today. Acceptance and success rates for these titanium-based dental implants are high - averaging at 95% - to mean that acceptance and integration is the rule rather than the exception here.

For the most part then, Titanium is the only basic material from which dental implants are crafted. Studies have been carried out on possible alternatives, but without much success. What is showing promise is not replacement of titanium by other materials in making the dental implants, but rather the incorporation of other materials like aluminum and vanadium with titanium to make even better dental implants.

by: James Maloney

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