Dental Implants in the Medically Compromised Patient Population

As a result of the increase of the life expectancy, elder people live with diverse diseases or conditions like systemic disorders, immune-related disorders, and psychiatric issues. Consecutively, practicing clinicians are faced with serving dental implant treatments in such a population comprised of medical and demographic characteristics. Most commonly, implant therapy is performed among patients above middle ages; therefore, clinicians often encounter medically compromised patients. The patients are usually with adverse conditions like bleeding disorders, bone diseases, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and/or immunologic conditions like cancer therapy, steroid or immunosuppressive or antiresorptive medication, alcoholism, smoking, and many others. Nevertheless, only few conditions could be stated for contraindication to dental implant therapy. Besides the broad range of the mentioned dental implant comorbidities smoking seems less prevalent compared to the general population. Dental implants in smoking patients are certainly affected in relation to the failure rate, marginal bone loss, and some other risks of postoperative complications. Hence, smoking or other similar conditions could be accounted as a chronic systemic disorder just like diabetes mellitus or drug usage. Briefly, it seems that establishing the medical and demographic conditions prior to implant therapy along with controlling the systemic diseases or disorders may be more important than the presence of compromise.