If you smoke cigarettes and you plan to get dental implants, consider quitting before your dental implant surgery. Smoking affects your dental health in general, increasing the risk of issues like tooth decay. But smoking can also cause dental implant failure.

Before you have your dental implants placed, consider quitting or cutting down on smoking as this habit can affect dental implants in the following ways.

1. Smoking Interferes With Dental Implant Healing

Dental implants can take several months to heal fully. For the first several weeks, you need to assist your mouth as much as you can to ensure that your gum and bone tissue heals quickly. Unfortunately, smoking interferes with the healing process. Not only does smoking reduce blood flow, which is crucial to healing, but it also reduces saliva production, which also assists with the healing process.

If you continue smoking, you could slow down the healing process. In a worst-case scenario, dental implants can fail due to smoking and other oral habits.

2. Smoking Increases the Risk of Gum Disease

Gum disease weakens your gum and bone tissue over time. As such, just as you need a good blood flow and salivary flow for healing, you need them to keep gum disease at bay. Gum disease can weaken gum and bone tissue, and this could cause a dental implant to fail.

3. Smoking Increases the Chances of Periimplantitis

Because smoking reduces your ability to fight off infection, you have a higher risk of suffering from oral infections like peri-implantitis. Peri-implantitis affects the soft tissues surrounding a dental implant and can cause dental implant failure.

4. Smoking Speeds up Bone Loss

Although the effect is only small, over time, the increased rate of bone loss that occurs in smokers can take its toll on the bone holding a dental implant in place. If you smoke, your dental implants might not last as long as they would if you didn't smoke.

5. Smoking Can Cause a Bone Graft to Fail

In many cases, patients need a bone graft before they can have a dental implant placed. This is because the bone in the area where a tooth is lost resorbs, which shrinks the jawbone. The patient then needs a bone graft, which takes several months to heal, to ensure they have enough bone to support their implant. But smoking can cause a new bone graft to fail before it can integrate fully.

Are you a smoker planning to get dental implants? Then consider cutting down on or quitting smoking. Your oral health will improve in general, and you'll give your dental implants the best chance of healing and fully integrating with your jawbone. Contact a dentist for more information regarding dental implants.

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