The reason why dental implants are superior over other tooth replacement options is simple — the jawbone fuses around them to provide exceptional stability and function. So, if you want to replace missing teeth or support dentures with dental implants, the key to success is having a strong jawbone that can anchor these replacements.
If, however, we find that there’s not enough bone in your upper jaw to support a dental implant, we may need to perform an extra step in the form of a sinus lift, which is a procedure that beefs up the foundational support in your jawbone.
Our team at Willow Glen Dental Specialists excels in oral surgeries of all kinds, including sinus lifts that allow people access to the best tooth replacement option available — dental implants.
In this blog post, we take a dive into how a sinus lift can bridge the gap to dental implants.
The main reason why 5 million dental implants are placed each year in the United States is that these replacement teeth offer unparalleled stability. We place a metal post into your jawbone and bone tissue grows around it, securing it to give you a tooth that functions, for all intents and purposes, like your natural teeth.
To reap these benefits, it’s important that you have strong bone to receive the implant, but that’s often not the case.
Normally, the bones in your body are constantly remodeling themselves, which means that bone cells are continually turning over to keep the hard tissue strong. This bone growth is activated by use — the more you use a bone, the more attention your body pays to keeping the bone strong.
When you lose a tooth, your body registers that there’s no activity in that area of your jawbone, and it ceases to rebuild the bone. Not only does it stop building bone, your body reabsorbs the existing bone, and this process happens quickly. You can lose 50% of the alveolar bone width (the ridge that holds your teeth) in just 12 months after losing a tooth.
If we need to replace a tooth in your upper jaw and you don’t have enough bone to anchor the replacement, we turn to the sinus lift.
You have four sets of paranasal sinuses in your face, and the ones we’re referring to with the sinus lift are your maxillary sinuses, which are located in your cheeks just above your upper jawbone.
With a sinus lift, we place bone graft materials along the bottom of your sinus, where it meets your alveolar ridge, to give it more depth and width.
We perform a sinus lift right here in our office, and you’re free to go home the same day. You may have a day or two of swelling, but immediate recovery is usually swift.
The longer-term recovery, when the grafts fuse into the bone, takes more time — typically 6-12 months. Once we feel that the grafts are cemented into place, we implant the post into a jawbone that can successfully hold your new tooth (or teeth).
We should add that, sometimes, we can perform the sinus lift and place the implant at the same time, allowing all of it to fuse together simultaneously.
If you have more questions about the sinus lift procedure, we’re just a phone call or click away. To get started, please contact our office in San Jose, California, at 408-478-9081 or request an appointment using our online form.
