Willow Dental Toronto Cosmetic Dentistry Blog

If you are considering getting one or more dental implants to replace your missing teeth, now might be a great time to quit smoking. Smoking is not only bad for your mouth as a whole and may have contributed to your initial loss of teeth, it dramatically inhibits your body's ability to recover from the dental implant procedure, increasing your risk of dental implant failure.

Smoking is toxic to the mouth and in particular the support structures of your teeth, the very tissues that you depend on to incorporate and support your dental implants. Smoking also reduces the blood supply to your bone, making it harder for your bone to recover from the stress of dental implant placement.

And the hazardous effects of smoking don’t stop there. Once your dental implant is finished incorporating itself into your jawbone, it is still at risk from smoking. Smoking decreases your body's ability to respond to bacterial attack. Studies have shown that up to 90% of patients with refractory periodontitis, a progressive destructive form of gum disease, are smokers. If your mouth is made vulnerable to bacterial attack, it is more likely that your body will suffer an infection which will attack the bone around the dental implant, leading to failure of the implant.

How dramatic is the effect of smoking on dental implant failure? One of the largest studies on the problem shows that dental implants are twice as likely to failure in smokers as in non-smokers (4% vs. 2%). A smaller study paints an even more graphic picture. In this study, patients who smoked a pack a day had a dental implant failure rate of nearly 31%, as opposed to a 1.4% failure rate for non-smoking patients.

Heavy smoking could make you a poor candidate for dental implants, and at the very least you will be asked to stop smoking temporarily before and after the procedure.

To learn more about dental implants, please contact Willow Dental, helping patients in the Toronto area from our office in Mississauga, Ontario.