Genetic susceptibility to dental implant failure: a critical review

The observation that clinical factors alone do not explain why some patients develop implant loss; the understanding of the osseointegrated implant failure as a complex, multifactorial process; and the observed aggregation of repetitive failure in certain individuals raise interesting questions related to host susceptibility to dental implant failure. Genetic analysis applied to dental implants began in the late 1990s, and since then, increased interest in genetic susceptibility to the phenotype has been demonstrated by several studies. These studies, however, have been based on and limited to candidate gene association analysis and were intended to find associations between specific alleles and/or genotypes of genetic markers and susceptibility to implant failure. The aim of this review is to provide a brief description of the current methodology for genetic analysis of complex traits, followed by a comprehensive review of the literature related to genetic susceptibility to dental implant failure and a discussion of different aspects of the applied methodology. Moreover, a novel approach of genome wide, case-control analysis is discussed as an alternative method to access genetic influence to dental implant failure mechanisms. Advances toward the elucidation of the genetic basis of dental implant loss may contribute to the understanding of why some patients do not respond to currently available treatments while others do and provide potential targets for effective screening, prevention, and treatment. For example, clinicians might be able to estimate, before the elective surgical procedure, the risk of a given patient to develop a negative individual host response.