Dental Implants vs Bridges
Question: I had a four tooth dental bridge on my front
teeth. I had one missing tooth, and the bridge attached to the three
other teeth.
Fifteen years later, two
of the teeth the bridge was attached to broke. I had to have root
canals and posts in those teeth to hold on the bridge. Then the
third tooth broke. Today, I am toothless since my dentist can't
attach the old bridge.
Would implants be a better choice for me, or
even a possibility?
- Suzanne
Dear Suzanne,
One of the disadvantages of having teeth
replaced with bridges is that you have to have the adjacent teeth
ground down and attach the bridge to them. This makes those teeth
weaker. If anything happens to those teeth that the bridge is
attached to, you have to get a whole new bridge.
Dental implants stand on their own. If you
have an implant, and there is trouble with the adjacent tooth, the
implant will be unaffected. Your history is a great illustration of
one of the advantages of implants. If you had this done at the very
beginning, you could have avoided the bridge and your dental care
would have been much simpler.
Now for full disclosure we need to say that
there are problems you can have with implants down the road--they
aren't a perfect solution. They can be affected by trauma or by gum
disease around the implants. But they aren't affected by any
problems with your other teeth, so in your case it appears that they
would be a much better solution for you.
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