Each year, about 500,000 North Americans get dental implants. If you are one of them, and are preparing to have an implant, it might be a good idea to start taking beta blockers, medication that controls high blood pressure, for a while.
“The success of procedures like dental implants depends mainly on how the existing bone accepts the implants to create a connection between the living bone and the surface of the implant,” says Prof. Faleh Tamimi, who teaches on the McGill Faculty of Dentistry, and is the senior author on a number of papers published on the subject in recent weeks. “Because some medications affect bone metabolism and the way that bone cells heal and multiply or die, they can have an important effect on the success of implants.”
New research indicates that in order to raise the odds that dental implants will attach properly, there may be benefits to taking certain common medications and avoiding others.
- 327 implants were in 142 people who took beta blockers for hypertension
- 1,172 implants were in 586 people who did not take beta blockers
- Failure rates of implants for people using beta blockers was 0.6%
- Failure rates of implants in people who do not take beta blockers was 4.1%
More than 640 million patients around the world take beta blockers to control hypertension.
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