Bone Augmentation

Sinus lift

Sinus lift
When an upper posterior tooth is lost, the floor of the maxillary sinus drops down into the space formerly occupied by the root of the lost tooth. In order to place an implant, it is often necessary to put the sinus floor back up to where it originally was by adding a synthetic bone substitute. This procedure is called a sinus floor bone augmentation or a sinus lift. The procedure is performed with local anasthesia, requiring up to six months of healing for the sinus augmentation to support dental implants. However, many surgeons (us including) perform both the augmentation and dental implant simultaneously, to avoid the necessity of two surgeries.

Bone deficiency
The biggest challenges in implant dentistry today come with a bone deficiency. Once you lose your tooth a jaw bone start atrophying in the area where a tooth was previously placed. This process is fastest in the first 2 months after losing your tooth. This is completely natural process (similar as muscle atrophy if you do not do exercises). If you had an inflammation process affecting your tooth root prior loosing your tooth, a bone resorption will be even bigger. In this case bacterial infection additionally destroys your jaw bone. To provide its prosthetic function dental implant has to be fully placed (screwed) inside the jaw bone. Very often there are situations where the bone does not have adequate thickness to accommodate an implant so we need to build additional bone prior implant surgery.

Bone augmentation
It is a term that describes a variety of procedures used to "build" bone so that dental implants can be placed. These procedures typically involve grafting (adding) bone or bonelike materials to the jaw. The graft can be your own bone or be processed bone (off the shelf). This process is known as GBR (Guided Bone Regeneration).

Your tooth needs to be extracted because it cannot be restored and you want to replace it with an implant
The best solution is to do tooth extraction, implant placement and bone augmentation in one visit. This way by placing an implant in the tooth socket and adding bone substitute in the remaining empty space within a tooth socket, we can reduce jaw bone atrophy and shorten a recovery time. If there is present an inflammatation process it needs to be resolved prior any implantology actions.

If your tooth is already missing and there is enough bone to place an implant but some bone is missing on the edge.
The best solution is to do implant placement and bone augmentation in one visit so valuable time is not lost.

If your tooth is already missing and there is no enough bone to place an implant.
In this case we need to do GBR (Guided Bone Regeneration) prior the implant surgery. After this procedure is done we need to wait for 4-6 months for the jaw bone to be fully created before we can start with implant placement. If we are talking about placing an implant in a maxilla (upper jaw) it is possible to have a situation that implant cannot be placed because the bottom of the sinus is an obstacle. In this case a sinus lift has to be done. This procedure often can be done together with implant placement so valuable time is not lost.