Bone Quality for dental Implants


Dental Implants require sufficient bone of good quality and quantity in order for the dental implants to have stability once the implants are placed in the bone.

Generally speaking the human lower jaw has tougher and more dense bone compared to the upper jaw which usually has more softer bone.

Once a tooth is removed, the bone in the tooth socket starts to remodel and resorb and after several months, there can be a lot of bone loss in the tooth socket caused by the loss of that tooth.

The ideal time for implant placement is around 6-8 weeks after tooth extraction at which time soft tissue healing has occured but a lot of bone loss has not yet occured. Waiting 6-8 weeks also allows any infection remaining in the tooth socket to be cleared up.

At pearl dental clinic, we usually place our implants 6-8 weeks after extractions. At that time we inspect the bone quality and quantity and there can usually be three scenarious:



a. One possibility is that there is insufficient bone present for implant placement and we will have to do bone augmentation to build-up the bone in that region. For bone augmentation we will use either donated human cadaver bone OR Bio-Oss (bovine derived) bone granules OR patients own bone. We will also use a porcine derived Bio-Gide membrane at that point.


Bone augmentation can fail (~25% failure rate) and the bone graft can become infected or become loose and lead to graft failure, in which case it will need to be redone or a different treatment tried.


Once bone grafting is carried out we will have to wait around 6 months for the patients own bone to grow into it before we can place the implant.



b. The second possibility is that the bone is slightly insufficient, in which case we can place the implant and do bone grafting at the same time.

We usually use Bio-Oss (bovine derived bone) and Bio-Gide (porcine derived membrane) along with placing the titanium implant.


c. The third possibility is that there is sufficient bone present and we can place the implant without doing any bone grafting.


Bone grafting is an important part of dental implantology and you can find our more about it on our bone grafting page.


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