Yes, young people get them quite often but for different reasons.
When you’re old, sometimes your immune system changes or you get gum disease just by the sheer length of time. You may have more lost teeth because you’ve lived a longer age.
But we get a lot of young people getting implants as well because maybe they’re born without teeth as a congenital defect where they just never had teeth so they want implants to replace it.
The other most common thing that we see in young people is that they cracked their tooth. They get smashed by a softball, they walk into a wall, they fall.
The tooth gets traumatised and needs to be extracted. So we do a lot of dental implants in younger people.
At the same time, if you’re too young, say you’re around 16 years old, we actually do not recommend dental implants.
Because once you put dental implants into the bone, it sticks to your bone, it fuses to your bone.
It’s not like teeth where you grow and your jawbone expands, with your teeth expanding with the jawbone.
Dental implants actually fuse -- and if you’re 16 years old and your face changes, what will happen is that if you put an implant too early when your face changes this implant gets left behind.
Let me give an analogy, say I’m 16 and my jaw is very small, then my implant will be stuck behind as the rest of my teeth move forward. It becomes very ugly.
We try to put implants in people that have stopped growing and that is a critical factor. So when you ask do we put dental implants in young people, we do if they have stopped growing.
