Outstanding Bone Grafting Procedures to Improve Your Oral Health

Description

Dr. Andrew Glenn can perform bone grafting procedures to fortify your jaw, including putty graft, block graft, or an advanced BMP procedure. Bone grafts are often performed on patients with weakened jaws in preparation for dental implant placement. In these cases, the bone graft is usually performed several months before the dental implants are placed.

If I try to compensate for a lack of bone by placing a dental implant that is too skinny or too short, it's like building a deck with too small of footing in the ground. It's not going to make the cut long-term, and so we fortunately live in a day and age where bone grafting has become a fairly predictable modality for rebuilding or reproducing the condition that used to exist there, in terms of volume. There's a lot of different methods of bone grafting, from simplest to most complex. A small defect in the bone, we treat with what we call a particulate graft or a putty graft. It's akin to spackling a little defect in your drywall. If a patient is missing either height or width of an area of bone, we'll employ a more intermediate technique, called a block graft, where literally a block of bone is moved either from that same patient, from a different area, a donor site, or from a separate human donor into the deficient area, fixated there for a period of months. And then, that essentially becomes their bone with time. And in the most complex and severe of defects, we utilize a protein called BMP. It stands for bone multigen protein. You put it where you want bone to grow and it magically appears. It's really pretty impressive stuff. Some bone graft we place with the implant there by not adding any recovery time at all. If grafting is a prerequisite to implants, it's usually about a six-month recovery prior to implant placement.

About the Practice