How Dental Implants Can Transform Your Smile and Oral Health

Those gap-toothed grins that kids flash are certainly adorable, but that same feature is decidedly less cute in adults. If you’re among the millions of Americans — at least 120 million, to be more precise — who are missing at least one tooth, we want to talk to you about dental implants, which can transform your smile and improve your oral health at the same time.

The team here at Baton Rouge Perio — led by periodontal experts Dr. Jenny Herman and Dr. Barry Biner — has a great deal of experience with dental implants. We’ve placed scores of dental implants in our patients, allowing them to smile, chew, and talk with confidence again, and we can do the same for you.

A smile for the ages

If you lose a tooth to tooth decay, gum disease, an infection, or trauma, the resulting gap in your teeth isn’t doing that great smile of yours any favors. 

With a dental implant, we install a metal post into your jawbone and place a crown over the post that will fit in beautifully with your surrounding teeth. This is because the crowns we use are made from materials like porcelain that mimic the natural coloring of your teeth.

Even better, these materials resists stains, which means your smile will feature an impeccably white dental implant and crown for years to come.

Dental implants go far beyond your smile

As of a year ago (in 2023), about 6% of Americans had a dental implant in their mouth, and this number is expected to jump to 23% by 2026. While the reason for this incredible growth includes the smile restoration we discussed above, it goes far beyond that.

Dental implants rise head and shoulders above other tooth restorations because they help preserve, and even improve, your oral health. 

For example, when you lose a tooth, your jaw not only stops growing bone in the area, it loses bone. Bone growth and remodeling occurs in areas that are active, as your body constantly turns over bone cells to maintain strength. If there’s no chewing activity in the part of your jawbone where your tooth is missing, bone regrowth grinds to a halt and your body reabsorbs the existing bone.

As a result, you can quickly lose bone tissue in your jawbone after losing a tooth, and this bone loss can spread and threaten the stability of neighboring teeth.

The only tooth restoration that can stop this bone loss is a dental implant because the post in your jawbone tricks your body into thinking there’s an active root in the area. So, your body continues to remodel the bone around the post and fuses it into place.

This means that you not only benefit from minimizing bone loss, your dental implant provides you with superior stability that allows you to chew and talk as you normally would.

Given how many boxes dental implants check, it’s little wonder why this restoration has become the gold standard for missing teeth at dental practices across the globe, including ours here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

If you’d like to learn more about how dental implants can improve your smile and your dental health, we invite you to contact us to schedule an appointment.