History of Dental Implants

There are many myths and misinformation about the inception of dental Implants. In this months’ article I decided to offer a brief history about the dental Implants.
Farid Noie.

While excavating Mayan burial sites in Honduras in 1931, archaeologists found a fragment of mandible of Mayan origin, dating from about 600 AD. This mandible, which is considered to be that of a woman in her twenties, had three tooth-shaped pieces of shell placed into the sockets of three missing lower incisor teeth. For forty years the archaeological world considered that these shells were placed after death in a manner also observed in the ancient Egyptians. In 1970, however, a Brazilian dental academic, Professor Amadeo Bobbio studied the jaw bone and took a series of radiographs. He noticed compact bone formation around two of the implants which led him to conclude that the implants were placed during her life.

In the 1950 at Cambridge University in England to study blood flow was being conducted in the living organism. These scientists designed a method of constructing a chamber of titanium which was embedded into the soft tissue of the ears of rabbits. In 1952 the Swedish Orthopedic Surgeon, Dr. Branemark, was interested in studying bone healing and regeneration, and adopted the Cambridge designed ‘rabbit ear chamber’ for use in the rabbit femur. Following several months of study he attempted to retrieve these expensive chambers from the rabbits and found that he was unable to remove them. He observed that bone had grown in such close proximity with the titanium fixtures that it effectively integrated to the metal. Dr. Branemark carried out many further studies into this phenomenon, using both animal and human subjects, which all confirmed this unique property of titanium.

Although Dr. Branemark had originally considered that the best use of his discovery would be in the area of knee and hip surgery, He finally decided that the mouth was more accessible for continued clinical observations. He concluded that the high rate of people with complete or at least some degree of tooth loss in the general population offered more subjects for widespread study. He termed the clinically observed adherence of bone with titanium as ‘Osseo-integration’. In 1965 Dr. Branemark, who was by then the Professor of Anatomy at Gothenburg University in Sweden, placed the first titanium dental implant into a human volunteer named Gusta Larsson. Mr. Larson, a Swede, who was had no teeth at the time, agreed to the test because he wanted to have teeth again. He died in 2005.
Simultaneous independent research in the United States by Stevens and Alexander led to a 1969 US patent filing for titanium dental implants. Over the next fourteen years Dr. Branemark published many studies on the use of titanium in dental implant until in 1978 he entered into a commercial partnership with Nobel-farma AB to manufacture the first generation of widely used dental implants.

To the present day over 7 million Branemark System implants have now been placed and hundreds of other companies are manufacturing similar design dental implants. Current evidence suggests that implants placed straight into an extraction socket have comparable success rates to those placed into healed bone.
Dental implant success is related to most importantly, operator skill, quality and quantity of the bone available at the site, and the patient's oral hygiene. The general consensus of opinion is that implants should carry a success rate of around 95%. One of the most important factors that determine implant success is the achievement and maintenance of implant immobility while integrating with the host bone. Other contributing factors to the success of dental implant placement, as with most surgical procedures, include the patient's overall general health and compliance with post-surgical care.

Over the last 10 years I have closely tracked the success ratio of my placed dental implants. I am proud to announce that to the date, my success ratio is over 98.8%. To find out if you are a candidate for dental implants please contact our office at (281) 332-4700 to schedule a complementary consultation, or visit our website at www.drnoie.com.