Dental implants: what challenges and opportunities are there on our horizon?

Dental implantology has revolutionized the dental profession by providing a practical and aesthetically pleasing replacement for lost or missing teeth. Today, implants are a routine therapeutic modality with a survival rate of over 95%.¹ Dental implantology with titanium has come a long way since its inception in the 1960s when Professor Per-Ingvar Brånemark first reported the phenomenon of osseo-integration. This article takes a comprehensive look at the history of dental implantology from the discovery of osseo-integration to the current practice of using conventional to zygomatic implants with bone grafts and soft tissue grafts.

In the 1950s, Professor Per-Ingvar Brånemark, an orthopaedic surgeon from Sweden, was studying bone healing and regeneration using titanium. In one of his experiments, he inserted a titanium chamber inside a rabbit’s femur to understand how the bone regenerates. However, when he attempted to remove the chamber, he found that it had fused with the bone in such a way that it was impossible to remove. From this observation, he realized that titanium could be integrated into live bone tissue.²