The importance of good oral hygiene to maintain implants

The earliest known dental implant that fused with the jaw bone took place around 600 AD, a 1931 Honduran excavation discovered. A young Mayan woman had implanted in her jaw bone three tooth-shaped shells, two of which fused. The implant was found by Dr and Mrs Wilson Propenoe in 1931 in Honduras. The pieces of shell had been placed in the sockets of three missing lower incisors of the mandible fragment (Figure 1).

Figure 1.First recorded implant found in 1931

In a Swedish laboratory in 1952, Professor Perr-Ingvar Branemark had a lucky accident. He discovered that it was impossible to recover any of the bone anchored titanium microscopes he was using for his research. The titanium had bonded irreversibly to living bone tissue, an observation that contradicted scientific theory at that time (Williams, 1992; Williams-McClarence, 2003). Dr Branemark subsequently found that under carefully controlled conditions, titanium could be structurally integrated into living bone with a high degree of predictability and without long-term tissue inflammation (Branemark et al, 1985).