When placing implants much attention is paid to aseptic and antiseptic of the whole process of the implant treatment. These precautions include also a good hygiene and sanitation of the oral cavity in the postoperative period. It is a microbial factor that can cause complications in lack of attention to the processing site of the dental implant procedure or insufficient care for implants. It also concerns smoking. Frankly speaking, smoking and dental implants are incompatible. Since the process of smoking is a factor causing complications during the process of dental implantation. However, many patients who have a considerable experience of smoking, decide to dental implantation. An implantologist warns still on the consultation that smoking increases the risk of the implant failure from 1% to 10%, and a patient should stop smoking at least for a month.
Dentists consider smoking as a special kind of contraindications to the dental implant procedure, as the risks connected with it, can bring all the work of the implantologist and financial costs of the patient to nothing, and can have the negative affect on the state of the body during the surgery. Therefore, smoking patients are always firstly recommended to have the other ways of dental prosthetics, and even to give up smoking in favor of the health and beauty of their teeth.
Since smoking is bad not only for overall health, but also for the implants both during their placement and after it, let’s contemplate the main complications the patient has who is not going to give up smoking during the dental implant procedure.
1. As implant survival is disturbed, the duration of this process increases as well as the frequency of the implant failure.
2. Wound and suture healing disorders.
3. Physiological processes in the body changed under the influence of smoking and the risk of complications after the surgery increases.
4. The formation of bacterial plaque on teeth, dentures and implants reduces the service life of implants.
5. If there is a need of bone augmentation in case of its atrophy, the risk of the material failure- a bone substitute increases.
6. The suture line disruption is possible due to the changes in the functioning of the capillaries.
7. As the processes of osseointegration are disturbed and the tissue at the site of the implant placement is infected, the incidence of the implant mobility and loss increases.
8. The reduction of the service life of a dental implant or denture.
What exactly causes all this damage? What processes in smoking affect a particular violation of therapeutic effect? What can be done to change it? First of all, poor oral hygiene is due to the increased number of bacteria, that can be changed only by very high doses and frequency of oral cavity sanation or the prescription of antibiotics. Hot smoke and gums create a violation in the mucosal tissues, preventing a rapid healing of wounds. The effect of nicotine on the capillaries causes their spasms and tissue blood supply disturbance, so the implant survival, bone regeneration and immune processes are broken, and as a result the frequent development of inflammatory reactions.
It remains to say that the only way to change these negative influences and implications for the dental implant procedure in patients who smoke, and reduce the risks of the implant failure is to give up smoking.