The hazards to general health posed by smoking are well-documented in numerous studies, yet they are being debated and even ignored by a great many people who continue to smoke.
While it is true that other studies indicate that the number of smokers has declined in recent years, a very large number of people, many of them dental patients, still smoke.
This opens the way for discussion, and study, of the implications of smoking on the survival of dental implants.
A number of studies have already been conducted that followed both smoking and non-smoking implant recipients for periods of some years length. One such, by R. Cavalcanti, et al., published in the European Journal of Oral Implantology, [2011 Spring; 4(1)] looked at 1727 patients, of whom 1178 were non-smokers and 549 were smokers.
The time period of this particular study was five years and the outcome measures of which were prosthesis and implant survival. A number of other factors were, of course, taken into consideration but, for the purposes of this discussion, are not noted here.This study was, as the authors wrote, retrospective in nature and they noted that any conclusions must be interpreted with caution.
In general, they found that five years after loading, the recipients who smoked had almost twice as many implant failures when compared with non-smokers.
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