Peri-implant soft tissues, height and thickness does it make a difference for sustainable health? what we know, what we miss, what it means for clinical practice.

Peri-implantitis is one of the major long-term threats for the success of implant therapy and a classical case where prevention pays high dividend. Identifying and mitigating the relevant risks is therefore a major effort at present and research is targeting many local and systemic directions. As part of these efforts, the dimensions of the peri-implant soft tissues have been attracting a lot of attention lately, looking for a possible link to peri-implantitis. Often approached as “thickness” or “height”, emerging studies are pointing towards risk identification in the dimensions of the peri-implant soft tissue. But how far have we come in this direction.

To name it is to know it

To start with, we need to define what we are looking for. In the oral mucosa of the edentoulous alveolar ridge, it is easy to define soft tissue “thickness” or “height” in the rather simple anatomic arrangement.