Dental implants and traceability: The Implant Passport

For more transparency!!!

In my daily practice, I encounter an increasingly frequent and thorny problem. Many patients come to me to have their dentures replaced or repaired on implants that were placed 10 or 15 years ago. In absolute terms, this does not pose any problems, except when these patients have no idea of the type or brand of implants fitted! There are dozens of implant systems, and they are not compatible with each other! Even within the same brand, there are different connectors (internal hexagon, external hexagon, Morse taper, trilobate, octagon, etc.).
It is therefore essential that when implants are placed, you obtain this information, which is vital for the durability and follow-up of your restorations. Think that your practitioner/implantologist may retire, move, or give up his practice to a colleague, this precious information may be lost and complicate enormously your long-term follow-up. The loss of this information can turn the simple repair of a prosthesis into a real police investigation, to find the trail of the implants placed!
You should ask for this information when the implant is placed: what brand, what type of implant, what diameter, what connection?
Ideally, your practitioner/implantologist should give you an implant passport on the same day, containing all this data, and stick the traceability labels of your implants on it. This is what we do systematically for our patients.
All the major implant brands provide this information in the form of a traceability label, containing in addition to the information seen above, the serial number of the implant, its batch number, its date of manufacture and its expiry date!
It is also important that the chosen implant system is tracked over time.
Some companies may go bankrupt, or simply disappear, the parts are then no longer available! This is why we have selected a major brand of implants, and above all we have selected a connector that has proved its worth, that is very widespread in the world(internal hexagon) and that has fallen into the public domain, so there will always be manufacturers to ensure the follow-up of the necessary parts. So long live your implants!

Dr Michaël LUMBROSO  

Implantologist - Periodontologist Versailles, 13 February 2013