Efficacy of a Ready Made Plastic Stent With Apically Repositioned Flap in Augmentation of the Peri Implant Soft Tissue

Keratinized gingiva around dental implants are necessary to achieve esthetic appearance in the anterior teeth, also it is more resistant to abrasion, recession, less in plaque accumulation and inflammation, and easy to manipulate during stage two surgery and impression making in prosthetic stage. For the aforementioned reasons over year's authors have developed many techniques to increase the amount of keratinized gingiva around the dental implants such techniques are apically and laterally repositioned flaps , free gingival grafts, acellular dermal matrix allograft , coronally repositioned flap and sub epithelial connective tissue flaps . Huh et al compared the effects of the use of a ready-made plastic stent on the width of peri-implant keratinized mucosa with those of conventional methods. In addition, the effect of a plastic stent on peri-implant soft tissue was examined through histological observations. Reported that the width of the keratinized mucosa was significantly higher and the distance from the top of the implant platform to the mucogingival junction was significantly longer in the ready-made plastic stent group. Thus this study will be performed to compare between the effect of the use of a ready- made plastic stent on the width of peri-implant keratinized tissue and that of conventional methods during first stage of implant surgery.