When we help restore or improve our patients’ smiles with ceramic dental implants, there are special procedures we include to provide extra support for their long-term success. After all, even with good dental insurance, implants can be a major investment – a worthwhile one, to be sure, but an investment nonetheless. When you get them done, you want them to last.
So, unlike many conventional practices, our holistic, biological office incorporates tools like ozone and platelet-rich fibrin (PRF) to support the body’s healing and integration of the implants with your jawbone so they function just like natural teeth.
And scientific studies bear this out.
One of the most recent looked at the impact of ozone on the soft tissues surrounding the implant. Sixty healthy adults took part, half of whom had their surgical sites irrigated with ozone water and gas. As a control group, the other half had their sites irrigated with a saline solution.
Each patient was assessed for inflammation, pain, and wound healing after 24 hours, 48 hours, and 7 days. At every point, those in the ozone group were found to have less inflammation, less pain, and better healing. No significant side effects were reported for either group.
Ozone therapy accelerated the tissue wound healing, minimized tissue inflammation and decreased pain.
Notably, this conclusion echoes the findings of previous studies, such as this one published last year in the Journal of Hard Tissue Biology.
The story is similar for platelet rich fibrin, or PRF for short, which is made from a small sample of your own blood and placed over surgical sites of all kinds to support healing. Research on its value to implant surgery is positive, to say the least.
For a 2018 review of the science, researchers sifted through almost 6000 human studies on PRF for bone regeneration and implant therapy, finding a dozen randomized controlled trials that met their criteria. Because the studies were so different from each other, the team found it impossible to conduct a meta-analysis. But they could – and did – evaluate the results of the trials.
Overall, only three studies showed no benefit. All of the others
showed superior outcomes for PRF for any of the evaluated variables, such as ridge dimension, bone regeneration, osseointegration process, soft tissue healing.
Thus, PRF, they concluded,
might reduce alveolar width resorption, and might enhance implant stability during the early phase of osseointegration.
To translate, PRF appeared to both preserve bone and help implants integrate better with that bone, enhancing their stability early on in the healing process. Although there was less evidence of PRF helping reduce pain and improve soft tissue healing, evidence from research on other surgical applications suggests that it could be beneficial in this way, too.
Now imagine the results we can get from ozone and PRF together: a more comfortable healing experience for you and excellent support for your implants’ long-term success – safe, nontoxic, and biocompatible.
