Dental implants are the most effective method for replacing teeth that have been lost. They look the most like your natural teeth and can last as long as your natural teeth. However, this will only be the case if you treat them with the utmost care. If you have bad habits, your dental implants could fail quickly. Here are the 6 things which can ruin your dental implants.
1. Skipping Flossing
Even though we know dental implants can’t cause cavities, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t brush them. After all, brushing your teeth gets rid of plaque, which can hurt not only your teeth but also your gums.
Even more so, flossing is essential for the same reason. When you floss, you can eliminate food and plaque stuck between your teeth. You can also eliminate food and plaque from the gum line and dental implant parts that a toothbrush can’t reach. Gum disease is the main reason dental implants fail, so it’s essential to keep your gums from getting hurt or sick.
2. Skipping Checkups
Getting regular professional cleanings is another way to keep gum disease at bay. Even if you brush and floss well, you will probably start to get hard deposits on your teeth called tartar. This can give oral bacteria a place to hide and lead to gum disease.
Having your teeth cleaned by a professional every six months can get rid of these deposits and keep the gums around the implant in good health. It also lets us find possible problems early enough to keep the implant from coming out.
3. Smoking
Smoking hurts your teeth, but it hurts your dental implants even more. It makes it more likely that you will get gum disease and makes it harder for your bone to grow back and connect to the dental implant. People who smoke are two or three times more likely to lose their dental implants. Quitting smoking can help keep your dental implants in good shape.
4. Chewing On Things That Aren’t Food
If you bite your nails or chew on pens when you’re nervous, it’s time to try to stop. Dental implants are made of some of the most advanced materials available, but they were made for chewing food, not plastic, metal, or complicated things like fingernails. And while we’re talking about it, ice is also not a portion of food.
If you chew on these hard things, you could break or chip your dental crown and hurt the bones around your dental implant, which could cause it to loosen or fail.
5. Making Tools With Your Teeth
People who use their teeth as tools like bottle openers, scissors, pliers, or even nutcrackers don’t so much chew on things that aren’t food as they bite down hard on them. This may not be as bad for your teeth as biting on things that aren’t food, but it could still cause damage to the crowns or loosen your implants, which aren’t strong enough to handle pulling or twisting forces.
6. Make Sure Your Money Is Safe
Like anything else you buy, you must take care of your dental implants to get the most out of them. But if you do, dental implants will serve you well for a long time, maybe thirty or forty years or more. For more information on dental implants, you can visit any implantologist nearby.
FAQs
The good news is that it’s easy to keep dental implants from failing. Taking care of your teeth and gums well is the best way to keep your dental implants healthy and in your mouth. Use an antibacterial mouthwash and brush and floss your teeth twice a day. Altering the method that you consume food is another important step that you need to take.
There are peri-implantitis and failed osseointegration, which are the two main reasons dental implants fail. When you don’t take good care of your teeth, like brushing and flossing, you can get peri-implantitis. It is a gum disease in which the infection hurts the bone.
Early implant failure seems to be most often caused by a lack of primary stability, trauma during surgery, or an infection. Signs of illness that show up early may mean that the problem will be much worse than if it happens later. This is because the primary bone healing process will have been messed up.