Periodontal Disease

Osseous Surgery

Your bone and gum tissue should fit snuggly around your teeth like a turtleneck around your neck. When you have periodontal disease, this supporting tissue and bone is destroyed, forming "pockets" which are deep spaces under the gum tissue around the teeth.

Over time, these pockets, or spaces, become deeper, providing a large home for bacteria to live. As bacteria develop, accumulate and advance under the gum tissue the toxic waste products that they give off create inflammation and irritation to the tissues resulting in bone and tissue loss. Eventually, too much bone is lost, and the teeth need to be extracted or just fall out.

A pocket reduction procedure may be recommended because you have pockets that are too deep to clean with daily at-home oral hygiene and too deep to reach with a professional "in office" care routine. Reduced pockets and a combination of daily oral hygiene and professional maintenance care increase your chances of keeping your natural teeth - and decreases your chances of serious health problems associated with periodontal disease.

Procedure

During this procedure, we will fold back the gum tissue and remove the disease-causing bacteria before reducing the damage that has occurred and securing the tissue back into place. In some cases, irregular surfaces of the damaged bone are smoothed to limit areas where disease-causing bacteria can hide. This allows the gum tissue to better reattach to healthy bone.