Bone Grafting in Tacoma: Rebuild Your Smile with Sound Surgical Arts
At Sound Surgical Arts, we pride ourselves on offering top-notch bone grafting services in Tacoma. We’re driven by a commitment to provide personalized care that meets your unique dental needs and goals. Our experienced team of dental specialists utilizes advanced techniques and technology to ensure a safe, comfortable, and effective treatment process.
Bone grafting with us is more than just a dental procedure. It’s a step towards improving your oral health, enhancing your smile, and boosting your self-esteem. It’s about restoring your ability to eat, speak, and laugh without any discomfort or embarrassment.
Bone Grafting Options at Sound Surgical Arts
At Sound Surgical Arts, we believe in providing customized solutions to match each patient’s specific needs. Our experienced dental professionals offer several types of bone grafting procedures, including:
- Autogenous Grafting: This technique involves harvesting a small piece of bone from another area of your own body, such as the chin or another jaw region. This method is ideal because it uses your bone cells, promoting faster and more successful healing.
- Allografts: These grafts incorporate human cadaver bone tissue that undergoes thorough processing to provide a sterile and safe grafting option. This method eliminates the need for an additional surgical site to harvest your bone.
- Xenografts: This approach uses bone material from an animal source, usually bovine (cow), which undergoes rigorous processing to allow safe use in humans. Xenografts present another viable alternative for patients who’d prefer not to have an additional surgical site.
- Alloplasts: These grafts comprise biocompatible synthetic materials that support bone regeneration in the required area. They are useful for patients concerned about using bone from other sources.
Aside from the mentioned options, we may also employ the use of growth factors or membranes to encourage new bone formation and improve the overall success of the grafting procedure.
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The Bone Grafting Procedure
Our bone grafting procedures at Sound Surgical Arts prioritize patient comfort and safety. The process typically involves:
- Initial Consultation: A thorough examination and consultation with our dental professionals to assess your unique bone grafting requirements and discuss the most suitable solution.
- Anesthesia: Local anesthesia is usually used to numb the treatment area and ensure that you’re comfortable throughout the procedure.
- Graft Material Placement: Our dental specialist will create a small incision to access the bone grafting site and place the chosen graft material.
- Closure and Healing: The incision site is closed with sutures, and a follow-up appointment after a few weeks assesses the healing progress.
Depending on the specific procedure, patients can experience a healing period between four and six months before pursuing dental implants.
About Bone Grafting
What is Bone Grafting?
Over a period of time, the jawbone associated with missing teeth atrophies and is reabsorbed. This often leaves a condition in which there is poor quality and quantity of bone suitable for placement of dental implants. In these situations, most patients are not candidates for placement of dental implants.
With bone grafting, we now have the opportunity to not only replace bone where it is missing, but also the ability to promote new bone growth in that location! This not only gives us the opportunity to place implants of proper length and width, it also gives us a chance to restore functionality and esthetic appearance.
Types of Bone Grafts
Autogenous Bone Grafts:
Autogenous bone grafts, also known as autografts, are made from your own bone, taken from somewhere else in the body. The bone is typically harvested from the chin, jaw, lower leg bone, or hip. Autogenous bone grafts are advantageous in that the graft material is live bone, meaning it contains living cellular elements that enhance bone growth.
However, one downside to the autograft is that it requires a second procedure to harvest bone from elsewhere in the body. Depending on your condition, a second procedure may not be in your best interest.
Allogenic Bone:
Allogenic bone, or allograft, is dead bone harvested from a cadaver, then processed using a freeze-dry method to extract the water via a vacuum. Unlike autogenous bone, allogenic bone cannot produce new bone on it’s own. Rather, it serves as a framework or scaffold over which bone from the surrounding bony walls can grow to fill the defect or void.
Xenogenic Bone:
Xenogenic bone is derived from non-living bone of another species, usually a cow. The bone is processed at very high temperatures to avoid the potential for immune rejection and contamination. Like allogenic grafts, xenogenic grafts serve as a framework for bone from the surrounding area to grow and fill the void.
Both allogenic and xenogenic bone grafting are advantageous in that they do not require a second procedure to harvest your own bone, as with autografts. However, because these options lack autograft’s bone-forming properties, bone regeneration may take longer than with autografts, with a less predictable outcome.
Demineralized Bone Matrix (DBM)/Demineralized Freeze-Dried Bone Allograft (DFDBA):
This product is processed allograft bone, containing collagen, proteins, and growth factors that are extracted from the allograft bone. It is available in the form of powder, putty, chips, or as a gel that can be injected through a syringe.
Graft Composites:
Graft composites consist of other bone graft materials and growth factors to achieve the benefits of a variety of substances. Some combinations may include: collagen/ceramic composite, which closely resembles the composition of natural bone, DBM combined with bone marrow cells, which aid in the growth of new bone, or a collagen/ceramic/autograft composite.
Bone Morphogenetic Proteins:
Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are proteins naturally produced in the body that promote and regulate bone formation and healing.
Each bone grafting option has its own risks and benefits. Our doctors will determine which type of bone graft material is right for you.