Bone Biology for Implant Dentistry in Atrophic Alveolar Ridge - Theory and Practice

It’s a common experience for dental clinicians to note that the edentulous alveolar ridges always become atrophic as time goes by. It was late in the 19th century that Doctor Wolff first mentioned that form follows function (Wolf, 1892, as cited in Bilezikian et al., 2002). He described the individual capacity of morphological adaptation to a specific function as an “ontological adaptation” against the gravity through a daily locomotion or other daily mechanical duties (Fig.1-a). As a dentist I may illustrate the “dental compensation” in an Angle’s class III malocclusion as a morphological adaptation to a masticatory function (Fig. 1-b), which itself is an example of the Wolff’s “ontological adaptation.”