Curated news from the periodontal and implant literature
A weekly digest of peer-reviewed, open-access research in periodontology, dental implantology, and peri-implant medicine. Articles are selected and summarized by Dr. Ernesto Bruschi — periodontist, implantologist, and oral surgeon.
Song YB, Park JW
How much does smoking actually cost an implant placed with simultaneous guided bone regeneration (GBR)? This 5-year retrospective cohort followed 55 patients (130 implants), stratified by smoking intensity around thresho...
Read more →Alshikh BAA, Eid MH, Amin A
Patient-specific PEEK meshes are being marketed as a step up from prebent titanium for guided bone regeneration (GBR). Does the data support it? This randomized clinical trial enrolled 14 patients (28 maxillary sites) wi...
Read more →Liu N, Chen Q, Zhao Y
In the most demanding zone for periodontal plastic surgery — multiple mandibular anterior recessions on a thin gingival phenotype — which approach delivers better coverage? This randomized controlled trial enrolled 59 pa...
Read more →Nwhator SO, Ogunwemimo MT, Akinyele OA
Everyone agrees periodontitis is linked to cardiovascular disease — but clinicians still can't answer the patient's question: how much of my endothelial risk comes from my gums? This narrative review (explicitly not a sy...
Read more →GBD 2023 Latin America and Caribbean Oral Disorders Collaborators
How big is the oral-disease burden, and is it shrinking? This Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2023 systematic analysis quantified oral disorders across 33 Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries from 1990 to 2023, wit...
Read more →Liu Y, Zhang H, Zhang L
Guided bone regeneration (GBR) accompanies a quarter to a half of all implant placements, yet it is far from a solved problem: a recent meta-analysis of 100 studies put the complication rate near 26%. This review starts ...
Read more →Raghoebar GM, Hakkers J, Telleman G
Does placing an implant in grafted bone compromise its long-term fate? Fifteen years of prospective data from two randomised controlled trials say the opposite — and the surprise runs counter to a common clinical instinc...
Read more →Chung J, Lee JS, Kim YT
The first objective in treating peri-implantitis is simple to state and brutally hard to achieve: remove the biofilm from the implant surface. But how much of the surface does conventional decontamination actually reach?...
Read more →Coote E, Patel N, Vijayanarayanan R
Periodontal disease travels with cardiovascular risk — that link is now well established. The harder question is economic: if non-surgical periodontal treatment (NSPT) lowers the chance of stroke and myocardial infarctio...
Read more →Mercado F, Loch C, Mustafa A
Few regenerative materials have aged as well as enamel matrix derivative (EMD, Emdogain). Thirty years after its introduction, it remains a fixture of periodontal regeneration — and its indications keep expanding into en...
Read more →Rapone B, Ferrara E, Tomarelli F
How many implants for a full-arch? Tilted or axial? Which prosthetic material, and what maintenance keeps peri-implantitis away? On these everyday questions practice is still heterogeneous. To bring order, an Italian Con...
Read more →Roccuzzo A, Li Y, Salvi GE
A tooth with a deep intrabony defect, pathologic migration, probing depth of 7 mm or more: the classic candidate for extraction. This prospective study asks whether, two decades on, that tooth can instead be kept. Forty-...
Read more →Lin L, Ren Y, Zhu E
Short implants promise to sidestep bone grafting in the atrophic jaw. The open question has always been time: do they hold at ten years? This systematic review and meta-analysis gathered randomized controlled trials (RCT...
Read more →Son SH, Lim KO, Han SH
Guided bone regeneration (GBR) often hinges on the membrane: it must hold space, stay where it is put, and ideally not need a second surgery to come out. This prospective single-arm study tested a three-dimensional prefo...
Read more →Todorovic J, Joda T, Eyüboğlu TF
A connective tissue graft (CTG) under a pontic builds back ridge contour and makes the bridge look like it grows from gum rather than rests on it. The aesthetic gain is rarely disputed; what stays unclear is whether it l...
Read more →Pelser D, Schepers M, Abou-Ayash S
Implant-supported fixed complete dentures restore the fully edentulous jaw with impressive reliability, but reliability is not the same as freedom from trouble. This retrospective cohort followed 91 such prostheses on 49...
Read more →Charde P, Tan BL, Matoug-Elwerfelli M
Periodontal disease is usually framed as an adult problem, but it begins quietly in childhood. This scoping review, conducted under PRISMA-ScR guidelines and registered on the Open Science Framework, gathered the scatter...
Read more →Ye Z, Zhang Y, Feng Z
The socket shield technique preserves the buccal bone and gingival architecture in the aesthetic zone by deliberately leaving a fragment of the patient's own root in place when an immediate implant is inserted. It works ...
Read more →Kniha K, Rink L, Ooms M
Zirconia implants are marketed on aesthetics and a metal-free promise, but how do they actually perform against titanium over the medium term? This 3-year split-mouth randomized controlled trial put the two materials in ...
Read more →Qian J, Zi-Zheng W, Teng X
Transcrestal sinus floor elevation is a delicate, largely blind procedure: the surgeon lifts the Schneiderian membrane through a narrow osteotomy with limited direct vision, and a perforation can compromise the graft. Th...
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