Bone Grafting

There are many ways in which bone can be augmented with all aim for the new piece of bone to slowly join to the underlying region and when healed and mature, an implant can be placed in a more favourable position.

These include:

Autogenous graft – to take a piece of bone from somewhere else and secure it as a block graft to a deficient area. It is still considered to be the gold standard of bone grating materials.

Some available donor sites intraorally are:

• The Symphysis
• The Ramus
• The angle of the mandible

Allograft bone – These are substitutes materials obtained from human donors. They were approved by the FDA for human application as fresh frozen or freeze dried materials with insignificant cross infection probability (1 in 1,000,000). Its preparation involves the removal of soft tissues and cells with ethanol, prior to sterilising it with gamma radiation.

Xenograft – or bovine bone substitutes are osteoconductive materials obtained mainly from cows but also can be obtained from pigs. It is very popular nowadays in clinical implantology especially in socket preservation post tooth-extraction. The chemical and physical characteristics of these substitutes are similar to human mineral matrix.

Synthetic grafts – These substitutes are prepared in laboratories using materials very similar to the natural bone. It carries no risk of cross infection nor any pain associated with harvesting bone from other sites.