The true cost of a dental implant

The true costs of dental implants (part 1)

Liviu Steier

A variety of different dentate and edentate clinical situations will require today consideration towards  treatment options of including a dental implant.

Among the non-arguable clinical indications where dental implants are to be primarily considered, are fully edentate patients with reduced bonny support and a high muscle insertion – here more often affected - the lower jaw, followed by the partially edentate patient with special emphasize on the well-known Kennedy classification (Glossary of Prosthetic Terms 2013)[1]:

Class I: Bilateral edentulous areas located posterior to the remaining natural teeth      

Class II: Unilateral edentulous areas located posterior the remaining natural teeth.

Class III: Unilateral edentulous area located both anterior and posterior to it.  

Class IV: A single bilateral (crossing the midline) edentulous area located anterior to the remaining natural teeth.       

More and more, dental implants are advised and placed today to replace diseased but savable teeth due to insufficient endodontic, periodontal and restorative education, knowledge, skills, expertise and technological availabilities under exposure and pressure to non-medical contributing factors. 

Cost efficiency analysis                is very often performed by dental practitioners to facilitate the decision making process with patients.[2]  Any cost efficiency analysis performed to critically appraise root canal treatment indication is doomed to fail by non-pecuniary reasons according to White et al. (2006)[3]       :

1.       Endodontics versus implant studies

Endodontic studies	Implant studies
“…few high-level studies have been published in the past 4 decades related to the success and failure of nonsurgical root canal therapy. Likewise, most studies of endodontic surgical outcomes are of low.”	“…evidence supporting dental implant therapy is generally derived from case series studies rather than from higher level cohort or controlled clinical trials.”

 

2.       Endodontic versus Implant success criteria

Endodontic success criteria	Implant success criteria
“Most endodontic studies report data in terms of success, not simply of tooth survival.”	“…implant studies classify outcomes in a 2-category outcome system (success/failure); whereas many endodontic studies use a 3-three category outcome system (eg, success/uncertain/failure), negating the ability to make direct comparisons of success rates.”

 

3.       Endodontic versus implant outcomes

Endodontic outcomes	Implant outcomes
“…a cumulative success rate of 83% for vital pulps and 79% for nonvital pulps.”	“…the available data weakly indicated that the … implants had a higher incidence of early failure, which sharply decreased over time; that the … implant with rougher surfaces a lower incidence of early failure, but an increased rate of failure over time; and that the … implants, with immediate loading, had a higher prevalence of late failures which was attributed to perimplantitis.”

 

4.       Complications

Endodontic complications	Implant complications
“…post and core prostheses had a substantially lower rate of complications than either fixed partial dentures or implant prostheses…”	“…there appears to be a greater number of clinical complications associated with implant prostheses than other types of prostheses.”

 

5.       Clinician Expertise, Experience, and Technical Quality

Endodontics	Implants
“Limited evidence suggests that operator experience or training and technical quality as measured by radiographs, has an influence on endodontic outcomes.”	“Some evidence suggests that general dentists can achieve results similar to those of specialists in single tooth replacement cases.”

 

6.       “Convenience”

      “…there are no data demonstrating that implants are broadly superior to natural teeth.”

7.       Costs

“…although the endodontic, restorative, and periodontic cost of retention was generally less than the cost of replacement by an implant-supported prosthesis, the costs could be close, and that the treatment plan should be based upon the prognosis of each tooth being considered. Certainly, more resources and time are needed for implant therapy than for endodontics and routine restorative procedures.”

 

Conclusions by White et al. (2006)

 

1. ”At this time, choices between implant and endodontic therapies cannot be solely based on outcomes measurement evidence. The existing evidence is inadequate and not amenable to direct comparison. Few useful consensus statements and standardized protocols exist. We suggest that the dentist be guided by Hippocrates: “As to diseases, make a habit of two things: to help, or at least, to do no harm.”

2. Although outcome data is inconclusive and not suited to direct comparison, endodontic and implant therapies profoundly differ in other ways, including biological processes, diagnostic modalities, outcome measures, failure patterns, failure modes, consequences, resources needed, and in some specific health care implications.

3. Although rigorous and clearly defined outcome measures have been proposed for use in endodontic and implant outcomes studies, they are very rarely used. The use of simple survival measures and life table analyses in combination with defined treatment protocols might allow a clinically relevant data bank to be efficiently realized.

4. Long-term, large, clearly defined studies, with simple and clear outcome measures are needed to measure the clinical performance of endodontic and implant therapies.

5. Outcomes information alone is insufficient to derive treatment matrices and clinical treatment decisions. Risk factors need to be identified and quantified.”

 

The true cost of a dental implant will have to imply more than just the price paid by the dentist to the manufacturer and the price paid by the patient to the dentist. This is why any cost efficacy calculation to influence the decision making process: to save or to extract is to be considered biased.

…and not to forget that manufacturing dental implants has an ecologic impact on our planet same as treatment procedures correlated to dental implant placement, bone augmentation, maintenance, etc.

It can be concluded that the true cost of a dental implant is different to the amount priced in a treatment plan guesstimate.

Part 2 to follow.

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[1] http://www.academyofprosthodontics.org/_Library/ap_articles_download/GPT8.pdf

[2] Pennington MW, Vernazza CR, Shackley P, Armstrong NT, Whitworth JM, Steele JG. Evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of root canal treatment using conventional approaches versus replacement with an implant. Int Endod J. 2009 Oct;42(10):874-83.

Kim SG, Solomon C. Cost-effectiveness of endodontic molar retreatment compared with fixed partial dentures and single-tooth implant alternatives. J Endod. 2011 Mar;37(3):321-5.

[3] White SN, Miklus VG, Potter KS, Cho J, Ngan AY. Endodontics and implants, a catalog of therapeutic contrasts. J Evid Based Dent Pract. 2006 Mar;6(1):101-9.