3rd Molar Transplants Work!
The above xray is one we just took 11/13/03 of a 3rd molar # 32 that we transplanted into the #19 socket about 2 years ago. It is solid as a rock as all of our transplants have been! If one can watch and wait till the right moment to do a transplant it is a wonderful treatment for the patient and their family. We are using wisdom teeth that are usually extracte anyway at a great cost and just discarded! this is much better than an implant or a bridge.
We have been doing 3rd molar transplants in our office for over 30 years now with the wonderful talent of our local Oral Surgeon Dr. Terry . A. Rust. We have occasionally done double transplants at the same time on the same patient and also placing upper 3rds into the lower and visa versa, taking the best donor of the 4. We have not had one failure that I can think of ..... You need a surgeon that is very fast and prepares the socket properly and can place a wire splint over the transplant keeping it fully submerged in the new socket for I think about 6 weeks.
The roots of the donor 3rd molar (Wisdom Tooth) must be about 1/3 formed ... enough to help secure it into the new prepared socket site. This is usually children between the ages of 11 - 14 yrs old. So far we have only done autogenisis transplants (only on the same person) But!, .. I have always been convinced that any family member matching enough for a kidney transplant would probably match close enough for a 3rd molar transplant that would not need any rejection drugs as the implant being mostly hard mineral structure would be less apt to be rejected.
