Jaw Augmentation Question and Answer Session by Dr. Philip Young of Bellevue & Aesthetic Facial Plastic Surgery:
Here are a few questions that someone wrote me regarding Jaw Augmentation that someone recently asked us:
1) What are the associated risk with this kind of surgery? i read online that these kind of procedure has a higher degree of infection rate when compare to other implant procedure. my concern is that since i am not from the states, so would have to travel to all the way from Asia for this surgery. if infection does occur, i would have to travel all the way back for to have the implant removed, a risk i am not too keen of. what are the infection rate of those who have under go mandible implant at your clinic?
The rate of infection is very low but lateral jaw implants are more likely to occur than other implants. They can get infected but that usually occurs the first week and we know how to take care of infections and let you keep your implant. This is in contrast to other surgeons who do implants, with infections they usually take them out. We know how to treat the infection with the implants in place so that you can keep your implants and not have to undergo another surgery to replace them.
2) if infection doesn’t occur in the first 3 to 4 weeks, what are the chances that infection might occur several months or several years later? i heard that infection might still occur even if infection doesn’t occur initially. what is your take on this?
After the first week it is much rarer and you would really have to traumatize the area to get it infected or something. There would have to be a blood collection of some sort and a violiation of the sterility that is there for an infection to breakout. If they do get infected later, we usually treat this situation like if it were infected early on after the surgical procedure.
3) once the implant has been inserted, does it cause any restriction in term of mouth movement or chewing or talking? and does the silicone implant grind at the mandible bone over the years? since the silicone is screw to the mandible, there is a chance that the the through wear and tear, the silicone might wear down the mandible bone.
It will restrict your movement for a few months at the beginning but this hasn’t been a major issue. The mandible is very strong and the implants are placed in this strong area of bone. The chance of erosion is very small and if it were to occur, the amount of erosion is small and unnoticeable as well. The silicone implants tend to erode the soft bone. We have seen this in chin implants when they are placed higher and not at the bottom of the chin bone. The higher location starts to involve the alveolar soft bone around the teeth.
4) do you custom design or custom make the implant base on individual patient requirement? beside implant, what that the option? do you use bone paste or bone cement as well?
Implants work the best and you can do custom implants but they are much more expensive. Bone paste and cement do not keep there shape as well as implants. But they can give you some volume temporarily. We do custom implants when a person needs both chin and jaw implants sometimes. The cost of these custom implants are somewhat prohibitive. Usually it costs several hundred dollars for the ct scan and the process with the company can be 2-3 thousand and this is just for the implant. With the surgery on top of that it can put you in the 10k range.
hope to hear from you soon.
Dr Philip Young