Dental implantsin Berkeley Township, NJ

Making implants last twenty years

Most pages about implants stop at the day the crown goes on. For anyone planning to keep them for two decades, that is the wrong place to stop.

An implant cannot decay. That is the good news and it is also where the false confidence comes from. What an implant can do is lose the bone around it. The gum can become inflamed, the inflammation can move down to the bone, and the bone can recede along the implant surface. Left alone long enough, the implant loosens and is lost. It does not hurt while this is happening, which is exactly why it gets missed.

What actually prevents it is unglamorous:

• Cleaning between and under the restoration every day, not just around it. For a fixed bridge on implants that means a floss threader, an interdental brush or a water flosser, and being shown how rather than told to.
• Regular hygiene appointments with someone who knows the restoration is there. Implants are cleaned differently from natural teeth; the wrong instrument scratches the surface and gives plaque somewhere to hold.
• Checking the bone level on an x-ray at intervals, so a change is caught while it is still millimetres.
• Getting a loose or clicking restoration looked at quickly. A screw that has worked loose is a small fix. A screw left loose for six months is often not.

If you already have implants placed elsewhere and have not had them checked in a few years, that is a reasonable appointment to make on its own.

Grinding, and why it matters more on implants

A natural tooth sits in a ligament that gives slightly and carries nerve endings that report pressure. An implant is fused directly to bone with neither. So a person who clenches at night feels less warning through an implant and puts more of the force straight into it.

That is why a night guard is part of the plan for some patients rather than an upsell, and why worn-down natural teeth elsewhere in the mouth are something we look at before deciding how to restore an implant. Fractured porcelain and loosened screws on implant crowns are more often a force problem than a materials problem.

Replacing a partial denture that is failing its anchor teeth

A removable partial clips onto the teeth that are left. Every time you take it in and out, those clasps tug. Over ten or fifteen years the anchor teeth loosen, and the usual course is that one gets extracted and a tooth is added to the partial, then another, then another. Each round makes the appliance bigger and the remaining teeth carry more.

The decision point comes when the next anchor tooth starts to go. At that stage, adding to the partial again buys a year or two. Planning the arch properly costs more now and stops the sequence.

What that plan looks like depends on the scan. It may be individual implants where the gaps are, an implant-supported bridge across a section, or a small number of implants under an overdenture so the appliance stops resting on teeth at all. Our implant denture page covers the overdenture route in detail.

We will also tell you when the remaining teeth are worth keeping and the partial is worth adding to. Not every case is a rebuild.

Coming to an appointment on your own

Around three in ten households in the township have someone over 65 living alone. That is not a small footnote when the treatment plan involves sedation, because sedation means you cannot drive home.

So we settle that question early rather than late. Many implant placements are done under local anesthetic only, and if yours can be, you drive yourself and the day involves nobody else. If sedation is genuinely the better option for your case, we say so at the consultation, so there is time to arrange a ride once instead of scrambling the week before.

If getting here is the obstacle rather than the treatment, say so when you book. Several communities in the township run their own transport, and we can schedule around a fixed pick-up time if we know about it in advance. Your community office is the place to check what runs.

If you live in South Seaside Park

South Seaside Park is part of Berkeley Township on paper, but it sits on the barrier island south of Seaside Park, and getting to the rest of your own township means a 16 mile drive back across the Mathis Bridge. For appointments, you are an island patient, not a mainland one. Our Toms River office is actually much closer to you than Bayville is: straight west over the bridge and you are here.

The practical point is summer traffic on Route 37 East, which is covered on our Barnegat Peninsula page.