What is Dental Bone Grafting?

When it comes to oral and periodontal surgery, there are many types of bone grafting surgeries that are performed for Rancho Santa Fe patients. The most common type of dental bone graft is a bone mineral powder from a human donor source, which stimulates your stem cells to grow new bone. The bone graft comes from a tissue bank that operates under the highest of safety standards, with strict screening and processing protocols to insure that the bone graft is completely safe and does not pass on any diseases to the recipient patient. In fact, this particular form of dental bone grafting using donor bone mineral powder has been used in dentistry for over 30 years with an extraordinary success rate!

There are many reasons that a Rancho Santa Fe resident may be in need of dental bone grafting, including but not limited to the following:

Three Types of Dental Bone Grafting Procedures

In her San Diego practice, Dr. Beck-Mayo performs many types of dental bone grafting procedures for Rancho Santa Fe patients:

  • Ridge Preservation

For many Rancho Santa Fe patients, it’s necessary to perform dental bone grafting immediately at the time of tooth extraction. This procedure preserves the natural contour of the jawbone by preventing the severe bone loss that commonly occurs as a result of tooth removal.  Ridge preservation bone grafts ensures adequate jawbone tissue to be present for a future dental implant, as well as to minimize bone loss and gum recession on neighboring teeth.  Dr. Beck-Mayo is highly-skilled in this procedure, having performed it thousands of times.  She also painstakingly studied the details of this procedure for her Master’s thesis.  The results of her research were so profound that they were chosen to be published in the world-renowned medical journal, the Journal of Periodontology. If you need to have a tooth extracted, particularly if you think you may want to have a dental implant placed in the future, you can trust Dr. Beck-Mayo is highly skilled in performing ridge preservation procedures.

While the thought of two surgeries performed simultaneously may make some dental patients squeamish, most Rancho Santa Fe patients and pleased to report that in Dr. Beck-Mayo’s expert hands, tooth extraction with ridge preservation is a relatively painless procedure with rapid recovery and healing. To summarize, ridge preservation bone grafting at the time of tooth extraction is an extremely common and predictable procedure that prevents long-term complications, such as jawbone deformation due to severe bone atrophy and compromised bone support and gum recession of adjacent teeth, both often requiring additional costly surgical procedures in the future, with compromised results.  Ridge preservation grafting maintains the natural contours of the bone and gum so that the future implant looks and feels just like the natural real tooth did and is easily maintained in good health.

  • Ridge Augmentation

            This procedure is also referred to as “guided bone regeneration”.  When a tooth has been missing for a prolonged period of time, or if ridge preservation grafting was not performed at the time of tooth extraction, severe bone atrophy can occur, requiring careful and complex reconstruction to allow proper placement of a dental implant. Guided bone regeneration can require several different materials and sometimes  multiple procedures just to get the site back to how it was when the tooth was present.

  • Sinus Grafting

An additional dental bone grafting procedure provided to Rancho Santa Fe patients by Dr. Beck-Mayo is called sinus grafting, “augmentation,” or “list.” For those unfamiliar with facial anatomy, the maxillary sinus is an empty space above the upper jaw, inside the cheek bones, just above your back upper teeth. For some patients, the tooth roots of these upper back teeth may actually extend into the sinus cavity, which does not usually cause any problems unless the tooth needs to be removed. Often times after extraction of an upper back tooth, the sinus space will actually enlarge, a process called “pnuematization.” This process reduces the amount of bone available to support a dental implant and  bone grafting of the sinus is required. The more teeth that are missing and the longer a tooth is absent increases the degree of pnuematization (bone loss/atrophy).  When this occurs, patients require sinus grafting/augmentation, also called a sinus lift, to allow for the proper placement of dental implants.

There are several techniques to achieve bone augmentation in the sinus and 3 dimensional imaging via cone beam CT scan is required to measure and analyze the area to determine the amount of augmentation required, and thus the surgical technique required to accomplish it. If the degree of bone loss/atrophy is severe, dental implant placement may need to be delayed until the recently grafted bone has healed sufficiently to support a dental implant.

Just like with ridge preservation, many of Dr. Beck-Mayo’s patients report that sinus grafting can be performed with only local anesthesia (commonly referred to as novocaine), without the need for heavy anesthesia. In expert hands like Dr. Beck-Mayo’s, the sinus bone augmentation procedure and recovery are virtually painless, often requiring only ibuprofen (advil) to relieve post-operative discomfort. Most sinus grafting patients in Rancho Santa Fe can return to work a day or two after their procedure.

  • Periodontal Bone Graft

Another common dental bone grafting procedure performed by Dr. Beck-Mayo is called a periodontal bone graft, or “regeneration”. With this procedure, Dr. Beck-Mayo repairs bone damage to a tooth or dental implant that has occurred as a result of chronic inflammation, commonly referred to as gum disease, periodontal disease, periodontitis, or peri-implantitis, when occurring around a dental implant. When performed properly and skillfully, like the expert hands of Dr. Beck-Mayo, periodontal bone grafting (regeneration) is an effective procedure to rebuild lost or damaged jawbone tissue and can save the affected tooth or dental implant.

If you’ve been told that you need any of these dental bone grafting procedures performed and you are in the Rancho Santa Fe area, there’s no more skillful, knowledgeable, and trust-worthy surgeon than San Diego’s own Dr. Beck-Mayo. With a doctorate degree in dental surgery from UCLA and three additional years in one of the best surgical specialty residency programs in the world at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio,  Dr. Beck-Mayo is an expert in periodontal bone grafting procedures. If you and in need of any of these bone graft procedures, you can trust that you are in good hands with Dr. Beck-Mayo.

Call our office in the Rancho Santa Fe area today to learn how she can help you obtain heathy teeth and smile that last a lifetime (858) 635-6700.