Effects of soft tissue punch size on the healing of peri-implant tissue in flapless implant surgery

A selection of abstracts of clinically relevant papers from other journals. The abstracts on this page have been chosen and edited by John R. Radford.

Abstract

A statistically better outcome when using smaller soft tissue punch sizes, but is this of any clinical significance?

Main

Lee D-H, Choi B-H et al. Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol Oral Radiol Endod 2010; 109: 525–530

There are numerous purported advantages of flapless implant surgery, most focusing on patient comfort and 'preservation of...soft tissue architecture'. This study was approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee of the Yonsei Medical Center in Seoul, Korea. Using mongrel dogs, the investigators report that the outcome when placing a 4 mm diameter implant, after use of a 3 mm tissue punch, was superior to when the punch size was 4 mm or 5 mm. These measurements were recorded 3 months after surgery. The mean probing depths for the 3 mm punch was 1.2 ± 0.6 v 1.8 ± 0.6 mm for a 5 mm punch (p <0.5) and for bone loss 0.3 ± 0.1 v 0.7 ± 0.5 mm (p <0.5) respectively. Do significant, but such small differences, result in better long-term patient outcomes?