If you need dental implants on Long Island or wherever you happen to live, you may happen to hear the word “osseointegration” either from your dentist or from the research you might do. It certainly sounds impressive, but how does it work, and why is it such an important part of modern implant science?

How It Works

The “osseo” in osseointegration comes from the Latin word for bones, and so osseointegration is the process of something integrating with your bones. This can happen to titanium because the metal has a way of bonding with the calcium in bones. Titanium isn’t the only option at this point thanks to new materials, but it’s still the most common type of implant whether you’re looking at replacement teeth or replacement hips.

Another aspect of osseointegration is surface area. A larger surface area gives titanium and calcium more places to bond together, and so manufacturers of modern implants will roughen up the surface with microscopic pits created with sandblasting or acid. In the end, a titanium implant can become so integrated with the bone around it that it becomes easier to break the bone than to remove it.

The History

Titanium implants date all the way back to 1940, a time when scientists were experimenting with adding metal implants to animals. However, it took until the 1960s for Per-Ingvar Brånemark to come up with the word “osseointegration” and use a titanium implant in a person. Incidentally, that first implant was a dental implant.

Unfortunately, the scientific community didn’t believe that titanium was as useful as Brånemark did, and so it took another 20 years for the titanium implant to catch on outside of his native country of Sweden. Once it did, though, titanium implants quickly became common throughout the world and started to show up in hips, shoulders, and replacement teeth. Dental implants were expensive at first, but fortunately, costs have been going down and today it’s easy to find a place that can give you dental implants on Long Island at an affordable rate.

Thanks to osseointegration, when you get dental implants on Long Island your replacement teeth can be just as permanent as the originals. A durable titanium screw can integrate with your jaw and anchor itself in place just as well as a normal tooth root, and with a porcelain crown on top your implant won’t have any trouble with biting or chewing.