Full Mouth Dental Implants vs. Single Tooth Implants: A Guide to Restoring Your Smile

The gold standard for tooth replacement is now dental implants. They replace the entire tooth, including the root that extends into your jawbone, reducing bone loss and providing a solution that can last the rest of your life.

At Bayside Dental Arts in Queens, New York, Dr. Andrey Ilyabayev and our team evaluate your case and recommend single or full mouth dental implants to replace missing teeth and give you a beautiful smile.

Dental implant basics

Unlike a basic dental bridge or dentures that sit on top of your gums, dental implants go all the way down into the bone. These posts are usually made of titanium and are shaped like a screw. In a surgical procedure, Dr. Ilyabayev places your implant(s) into the bone of your jaw.

After a few months to give your gums a chance to heal and let bone grow into and around the threads of the screw, he adds a collar and restoration to the top of the post, leaving you with a result that looks natural, is functional, and is long-lasting.

Single dental implants

If you’ve only lost one or two teeth, a single dental implant can support each isolated tooth, or even several teeth. The part of every new tooth that shows is called the pontic, and one implant can support several pontics in a row or even apart from each other. 

Single implants help stimulate the bone in the gap(s) and prevent bone from dissolving over time. This is important because bone loss makes adjacent teeth — even healthy ones — loosen and fall out, causing a cascading effect of ongoing tooth loss.

Full mouth dental implants

If you’re missing a lot of teeth, the bone underlying your jaw may have deteriorated over time, and replacing each individual tooth with an implant could cause too much strain on the weakened bone. Likewise, if you’ve lost all of your teeth, you’ve probably sustained a lot of bone loss.

In these cases, Dr. Ilyabayev might use full mouth dental implants to replace entire arches of teeth (upper jaw, lower jaw, or both.) Full mouth implants use multiple implants spaced out across the arch to support a complete restoration.

Our All-On-4 dentures let you get a complete arch of beautiful tooth restorations with just four implants, strategically placed across the upper or lower jaw. They are spaced roughly the same distance apart, but are located precisely where you have the most bone and support. 

If you don’t have enough bone, Dr. Ilyabayev can graft donor bone from a bone bank into your jaw to strengthen weak places in advance of dental implant placement. If you have periodontal disease (gum disease), we treat that before placing implants to prevent implant failure.

Are you interested in single or full mouth dental implants? Schedule an appointment at our Bayside, New York, office. To get in touch, call us at 315-908-0804 or book an appointment online today.