Dental Implants – Reston, VA

Initial Dental Implant Consultation

The very first part of the process involves an initial consultation. This appointment is simply meant for your dentist to assess your situation, discuss your smile goals and concerns, and determine if you’re eligible for dental implant treatment. They’ll also walk you through the entire process and provide you with a precise cost estimate so you know what to expect. If you require any preliminary procedures, such as bone grafting, gum disease therapy, or extractions, we can perform these to get you ready for dental implants.

Dental Implant Surgery

On the day of your surgery, we’ll first completely numb your mouth so that you remain pain-free throughout the procedure. We can also provide sedation dentistry to ensure that you’re as relaxed as possible. Once we’ve confirmed that you’re safe and comfortable, we’ll begin the process by making a tiny incision in the gums where we’re going to place your implants. After we’ve placed them in their proper angles and locations, we’ll close your gum tissue around them and cover them with protective caps so the implants stay safe while you heal.

Dental Implant Osseointegration & Abutment

Over the next few months, you’ll undergo a process called osseointegration—when the jawbone fuses with the dental implants. This is what will create a stable and lifelike foundation for your restorations, that way your new teeth won’t shift out of place when eating or speaking. This process usually takes around three to six months to complete. Afterward, you’ll return to our office to receive your abutments—small metal connectors that link your artificial teeth to your metal posts.

Delivery of Dental Implant Restoration(s)

Once your gums have recovered from getting your abutments, you’ll return to your dentist’s office to receive your new dental crown, bridge, or denture. Your team will double-check that they fit perfectly and that you’re completely satisfied with the results before sending you on your way to enjoy your brand-new grin.

Day-to-Day Benefits

The most apparent benefits of implants are the day-to-day ones. In particular, these are the following:

• Improved Confidence – By filling in your previous smile gaps, implants help your confidence. They thus help your body image and reduce your anxiety, making socializing easier. Once the latter happens, you’ll have better relationships with friends and family!
• A Restored Smile – Since they’re capped with dental crowns, implants look pretty and blend seamlessly with surrounding teeth. They thus fully restore your smile and make it beautiful.
• Easy Eating – Due to acting like substitute teeth, implants do much to restore your bite force. As a result, the they’ll allow you to eat your favorite tough foods.
• Low Maintenance – Unlike dentures or bridges, implants don’t require special upkeep approaches. Rather, you can simply clean them as you would natural teeth. So long as you brush them twice daily and floss between them once daily, the restorations should stay clean and functional.

Health Benefits

Of course, implants also have less-obvious advantages. Some of these are health-related, being geared toward oral health in particular. Such perks typically include:

• A Strong Jawbone – If you leave tooth loss untended, it can cause your jawbone to erode and shrink. That process can then lead to facial collapse. Implants, though, can stimulate your jawbone to prevent such erosion.
• Nutritious Meals – Unfilled gaps between teeth let harmful germs breed, harmful germs, raising your risk of oral problems. However, implants fill these spaces and make teeth cleaning easier. Your odds of a severe dental issue then decrease.
• Support for Nearby Teeth – Besides a shrinking jawbone, tooth loss can cause still-remaining teeth to tilt and fall out. Thankfully, implants fill your smile gaps to prevent this outcome.
• No Sensitivity – Unlike dentures or bridges, implants don’t rub against other teeth or gum tissue. Consequently, they don’t irritate your various mouth tissues.

Long-term Benefits

Perhaps the most outstanding upsides to implants are the long-term benefits. In particular, these are:

• High Treatment Success – Implants hardly ever fail post-placement if you care for them well. Most of these prosthetics have ten-year success rate sits at over 95%!
• Long-Lasting Results – An average dental implant lasts roughly 15-20 years. If maintained exceptionally well, however, its lifespan can reach of 30 years or more. With that being the case, your new implants potentially work for a lifetime.
• Cost-Effectiveness – Compared to dentures or bridges, implants save you more money overall. This cost-effectiveness is due to the treatment’s longevity, as the prosthetics last much longer than Lucia or Ludo. Their long lifespans mean they don’t involve many replacement or repair fees.

Dental implants anchor to your jawbone, so you need to have a significant amount of healthy bone tissue in your jaw to support the implant. If you don’t have enough healthy bone tissue in your jaw, the team at Northern Virginia Oral, Maxillofacial & Implant Surgery can perform a bone graft to augment your bone mass.

Healthy gums are also important for successful dental implants. If you’re suffering from gingivitis or gum disease, it needs to be treated before getting dental implants.

Missing Single Tooth

With more than 120 million people living with at least one missing tooth, we can address this issue with the help of a single dental implant, metal abutment, and customized dental crown. Because it can blend in with your existing smile, you’ll enjoy a more pleasing and complete aesthetic as well as optimal functionality when eating, speaking, and smiling.

Missing Multiple Teeth

When a space exists in your smile, you might assume a fixed bridge is the only way to treat it. However, with an implant bridge, we can place two dental implant posts on either side of the gap. This eliminates the need to alter healthy abutment teeth that might otherwise be used as anchors for your restoration.

Missing All of Your Teeth

Using an average of six to eight dental implants to replace an entire arch of teeth, we can position your smile to support a customized implant denture. However, with All-On-4, we can reduce the number of implant posts, avoid potential bone grafts, and ensure the same great results.

Preliminary Treatments & Dental Implant Surgery

Unfortunately, it’s not really possible to just tell you what your dental implant treatment is going to cost without taking careful account of your unique situation. This is because many patients have oral health problems that necessitate preliminary dental treatments. For example, some people notice that their jaws shrink once they’ve lost their teeth. If this has happened to you, you may need a bone graft or sinus lift before getting your dental implant.

Then there’s the surgery itself. While having surgeries performed in-house means that you won’t have to guess about the cost of treatment, you should also factor in costs like the price of anesthesia that you may not immediately jump to consider.

The Parts of Your Dental Implant

Then there’s the design of your dental implant, which also plays a significant role in the cost of the treatment. First of all, you’ll need to consider the type or restoration you need. In general, the more teeth you’re replacing with a restoration, the more it’s likely to cost.

Some dental implants may also need to be longer or shorter than others, and smaller implants will require more precision. As a consequence, shorter implants are more expensive.

Finally there’s the brand of the implant you’re getting. The differences between them can be a little bit difficult to explain, so we’ll walk you through which brand to use when we see you in person.

How Dental Implants Pay for Themselves

If you’re budget-minded, you may be tempted to opt for the cheaper dental bridges or dentures.  However, you probably also hope to keep your restoration around for a while, which means that it’s a good idea to figure out what the most economical option is long-term.

Dental implants outlast other methods of tooth replacement by a factor of two-to-one, which means that the money you spend on them is likely to save you on replacements in the long run. Add to that the other benefits of dental implants, like their strength and realism, and it’s easy to see how they can pay for themselves.

Does My Dental Insurance Cover Dental Implants?

Unfortunately, dental implants are rarely covered by dental insurance. However, rarely isn’t the same thing as never, so we’ll spend time dealing with your insurance company to ensure that you’re maximizing your benefits’ coverage. In some cases, you may also be able to cover a part of your dental implant, like the crown that sits on top of it.

Making Dental Implants Affordable 

You shouldn’t be scared of the cost of dental implants because insurance won’t pay for them—we have options available that can make the treatment more affordable. We accept CareCredit, which is a healthcare financing provider that can make dentistry considerably easier to pay for.

CareCredit offers six-month-no-interest financing, and longer terms for patients who need them. If you’re wondering about the financial options available to you, give us a call and we’ll be happy to help.

3D Cone Beam Imaging

You might be expecting to have traditional dental X-rays taken before the dental implant process, but this approach typically won’t allow us to gather all of the information that we need. A 3D cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) scanner allows us to comprehensively map out your entire mouth and jaw, and the images it creates include critical details such as the locations of nerve paths and other relevant oral structures.

With our CBCT scanner, we can determine the best locations to insert the dental implant posts while also identifying any obstacles that will need to be accounted for during the surgery. The information provided by the scanner is invaluable when it comes to ensuring that your dental implants will be able to last for many years.

Guided Dental Implant Surgery

It’s not hard to figure out where a dental implant needs to go when there are still teeth on either side of the gap being filled. But if you have suffered from extensive tooth loss, locating the correct spots for the implant posts can be significantly trickier. Luckily, our team has a simple solution: create a surgical guide that gives us a clear visual of where the posts need to go.

To design the surgical guide, we will first need to perform a CBCT scan of your mouth. After that, the guide can be 3D-printed so that it can be used during the surgery.

Dental implant procedures performed with a surgical guide tend to be much more precise. This helps reduce discomfort during the process, which is good news for our patients. On top of that, the surgical guide will allow us to make smaller incisions in your gums; this means you won’t have to wait as long for the tissue to recover following the surgery.

Digital Impression System

Every smile is unique, which is why the crown, bridge, or denture that your dental implants will support must be carefully customized to ensure that it’s the right shape and size. Instead of relying on traditional impressions made out of dental putty, we make use of digital impressions, which simply involve creating a three-dimensional model of your mouth based on a quick scan.

Digital impressions have many advantages over traditional ones. They can be taken faster, and there’s no uncomfortable putty involved. On top of that, the precision of digital impressions means that errors are less likely to occur.