Early dental implant failure associated with postoperative infection: A retrospective 21-year study

Abstract

Aim: There are several causes related to early dental implant failure, and infection is one of the most common risk factors in the initial phase of osseointegration. The aim of this retrospective study was to evaluate early dental implant failure associated with postoperative infection and identify the factors associated with such failure. Materials and Methods: A retrospective study was conducted, and the main predictor variable was early dental implant failure. The main cause of failure was postoperative infection, including factors related to early loss due to infection, such as installation site, type of implant–abutment connection used and presence of previous bone graft. Appropriate descriptive and multivariate statistics were computed, and Chi-square tests and logistic binary regression were used to identify the factors related to early failure. Results: The study sample consisted of 1674 patients, who had 4886 implants installed and were selected for statistical analysis. A total of 3219 implants were inserted in women and 1667 in men. The main outcome variable was early implant failure due to infection. There were 164 early failures in the study, accounting for 3.3% of the sample. Of those failures, 35 were a consequence of postoperative infection, resulting in 21.34% of early failures. The main risk factor identified was the presence of infection (odds ratio [OR] = 53.67, with 95% confidence interval [CI]). Conclusions: The study's results suggest that infection may be considered a risk factor for early failure of osseointegrated implants.