PerioSpot | Dental Insights

Ridge preservation, mean mid-buccal height change: +1.3 mm (Iasella 2003). Reads like a clean win. The SD is ±2.0 mm. The range runs -2.0 to +4.5 mm. Some preserved sites lost height. The average held. The predictability did not.

Could a single mouth rinse screen for severe periodontitis? Oral-rinse microbiota from 3,770 adults trained a model that identified severe periodontitis with AUROC 0.81, and 0.83 in an independent cohort (Xie 2026). Promising. It cannot tell you which site is breaking down.

Sequence is a decision, not an afterthought. Bone and implant position set the ceiling for what the soft tissue can ever look like. Graft the tissue first and you are decorating a room whose walls are in the wrong place. Build the envelope. Then decorate it.

The palate is the one site we routinely harvest from and then leave open. A connective tissue graft donor wound heals by secondary intention under a clot. That is why the discomfort is real, and why patients often notice the donor site more than the site we actually treated.

After 25 years, 94 percent of these implants still worked. The Bernese cohort followed tissue-level implants for a quarter century: 94.0 percent survival, 90.8 percent success. Peri-implantitis reached 18.1 percent of patients (Couso-Queiruga 2026). Functioning is not healthy.

An intrabony defect is one of the few places in periodontics where we can genuinely regain attachment. In contained defects, regenerative approaches show attachment gain over open flap debridement in trials. The remaining walls do much of the work. Anatomy sets the ceiling.

Marginal bone loss is not automatically failure. Some remodeling in the first year is expected while the soft tissue seal and the bone find their level. The question is not whether the bone moved. It is whether it is still moving. One radiograph is a snapshot, not a trend.

A barber surgeon in the 1500s built one of the first palate obturators. Ambroise Pare, who argued battlefield wounds should be dressed, not cauterized with boiling oil, described a plate to close a palatal defect so patients could speak. Prosthodontics before prosthodontics.

Can losing every tooth make the body age faster? 1,889 older adults were followed. Before adjustment, edentulous participants looked 5.8 biological years older. After accounting for earlier health and circumstances, 0.82 years (Matsuyama 2026). The adjustment is the story.