How Smokers Can Take Care of Their New Dental Implants

Smoking perhaps doesn't go hand in hand with a shiny, white smile. When regularly distributed across the porous surfaces of your teeth, the tar and nicotine present in cigarette smoke can result in the progressive discolouration of your smile. While some whitening products can help to offset the effect of this discolouration, smokers may have to work harder than non-smokers to keep their smile healthy. Of course, dental health is more than the whiteness of your teeth, and smokers need to be mindful of the impact that smoking can have on their overall oral health, particularly when they require a significant procedure such as a dental implant.

Dental implants and smoking don't exactly work well together, so what can you do as a smoker who is about to receive an implant?

Understand the Success Rates

Statistically speaking, dental implants are a highly successful form of tooth replacement. And yet, as is the case with any medical procedure, the process can be unsuccessful. However, the odds are on your side. Dental implants have an extremely low failure rate, with only 1.4 per cent of implants failing. The situation is somewhat different for smokers, with dental implants having a failure rate of 15.8 per cent for those who smoke.

Smoking can be detrimental to your overall health, which will affect any required medical procedure, and receiving an implant in your mouth is no different. Smoking can decrease your circulatory rate, and this poor circulation can play a role in just how well your body heals. When receiving a dental implant, your body needs to heal around the foreign object, which is when your jawbone fuses to the metallic implant in your jaw that will host the prosthetic tooth (this fusing process is known as osseointegration). If your healing capabilities are compromised, then osseointegration can be unsuccessful, and as such, your implant will simply be ineffective. So, shouldn't you just quit smoking? If only it was that simple.

Transition Away from Cigarettes

If you're capable of going cold turkey with your smoking, then by all means, you should do so. Your implant presents a logical opportunity to make the effort. But for heavy smokers who are reliant on nicotine, simply quitting altogether is not going to be so easy. And yet you have options.

Luckily, you have options. One option is replacing your smoking with a nicotine substitute such as a patch or gum. You could also opt to vape instead of smoke. Although vaping is perhaps less detrimental to your health than smoking, it can still affect your circulation, which can be problematic with healing. Discuss this option with your dentist as a means to transition away from smoking during your healing. It's not an ideal course of action, and yet it's a means of addressing your nicotine dependency without having the same impact on your implant.

Perhaps your dental implant will be the chance to alter your nicotine intake with a view to permanently freeing yourself from smoking. It's worth it, both for the sake of your ongoing health, and to reduce any complications with your implant.

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