5 Reasons to Quit Smoking After Getting Dental Implants
When you get dental implants fitted, it is likely that your oral surgeon will advise you to avoid smoking while your oral tissues heal from the surgery. This is a fantastic opportunity to kick the habit altogether. Here are a few good reasons to give up cigarettes for good to protect your dental implants.
1. Smoke Hinders Healing
After getting dental implants, you will probably experience some discomfort and possibly even a small amount of bleeding from your gums. This is because oral surgeons have to make incisions in the gum tissue to insert the titanium posts that support the crown parts of your dental implants. Non-smokers usually recover quickly from this surgery, but tobacco smoke slows healing, which could mean you experience discomfort or pain for a longer period.
2. Smoking Can Cause Infection
Smoking raises the risk of an oral infection following dental implant surgery. Infections often involve pain and swelling in the gum tissue. In serious cases, an infection can even lead to dental implants failing to integrate into the jaw, leading to them needing to be removed.
3. Smokers Have Poor Blood Flow
The chemicals in tobacco smoke damage the tiny blood vessels that supply blood to the jawbone and surrounding tissues. If you smoke, it is likely to take much longer for your dental implants to fully integrate into your jawbone, which is a process that must happen in order for your implants to be fully secure in your mouth. Even after the initial period of recovery from dental implant surgery, poor blood flow caused by smoking could make your implants more likely to fail.
4. Smokers Have More Gum Disease
Smoking doubles your risk of developing gum disease, which is bad news for your dental implants. All implants rely on healthy gum tissue to hold them securely in place. If gum disease becomes serious, your dentist might have to remove your dental implants in order to treat the disease. While regular dental checkups can help to halt the spread of gum disease, many treatments for the disease are not as effective in smokers as they are in non-smokers.
5. Quitting Improves Your Chance of Implant Success
When a smoker gets dental implants, there is a 15.8% chance that the implants will fail and need to be removed. You can lower this chance to just 1.4% by throwing out your cigarettes and staying away from tobacco for good.
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