Full mouth implants

[Gillian]

Hi

I lost all my teeth a few years ago and I am now looking to have a full mouth of implants. I would like to know how many dental implants I would need for a full mouth of implants?

[Dr Vahid Motahar]

Hi,

Thank you for your post.

The number of implants needed to fully rehabilitate a mouth that does not have any teeth depends on the type of restoration one would wish to place on top the implants.

If one is considering to economise on the cost of implants by trying to keep the number of implants down, then can consider implant retained dentures and ideally 4 implants per arch are needed. Some studies recently has been trying to suggest that for the lower jaw it may be possible to just place 2 implants to retain the denture. But many are still in favour of having 4 implants in each jaw.

The alternative to implant retained denture, if one does not wish to consider having dentures and more is in favour of restorations on top of the implants that are not removable, it is possible to consider implant retained crowns or bridges. Again here to minimie the cost of the treatment and that each implant can support up to 1 and 1/2 teeth in load, many consider having 6 implant per jaw to support a 10 unit implant retained bridge. If they wish to have more teeth then they can increase the number of implants per jaw to 8 implants to support 12 teeth per arch which are implant retained crowns and bridges.

There are some recent schools of thought that has been suggesting to support 10 teeth in each jaw by means of just 4 implants. But these are very new ideas that we have little information to support the longevity of the restoration and most of the implantologist are still following the more establishes ideas as they have been tested for longer and has been shown that thease ideas work.

To consider your case, we really need to assess you case clinically and would be very happy to offer a free implant consultation.