Tooth can not be saved and want dental implant to replace it in the future. Will there be enough bone after tooth extraction and bone resorption? Is there anything we can do to try to keep as much bone as possible and make the future implant straightforward? The answer is dental alveolar ridge preservation.
In this case, the top front tooth had root fracture and periapical abscess. It's unrestorable and a dental implant option was chosen to replace the missing tooth in the future. Due to severe infection, the most of buccal bone around the extracted tooth was lost. Severe bone resorption would happen and dental implant would be impossible without any complicated bone grafting in the future.
Fortunately ridge preservation procedure was performed with guided bone regeneration. 3 month later, a large amount of new bone formed, especially alveolar ridge height, which is difficult to achieve satisfactory result once bone resorption has happened. The site is ready for a dental implant.
However there was a surprise at the end because the patient decided to do dental bridge instead of implant. So we couldn't confirm the bone quantity with CBCT even thought the x-ray looks very promising.
To choose dental bridge instead of implant, two adjacent sound teeth have to be damaged and also it's difficult to floss under dental bridge. It's a shame that the patient changed his mind, especially after so much effort, time and money has been spent to prepare the site for dental implant and everything is ready for the implant.