Level and type of clinician training has an impact on implant outcome: a retrospective study
The level and type of clinician training has an impact on implant outcome. This follows from a study by Sonkar et al. (2019), in which 2048 dental implants were placed in 471 patients seen by residents from the departments of Periodontics, Prosthodontics, and Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMFS) at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center School of Dentistry.
The following parameters were analysed using multilevel logistic regression analysis: demographics, implant parameters, department, and residents' year of training. A total of 1449 implants were included in the study. Overall, the advanced group (94.2%) had the best implant outcomes followed by the intermediate group (89.38%) and beginner group (88.6%).
These findings are in line with previously published periodontal treatment studies that reported a positive association between increased clinician experience and improved outcomes of periodontal procedures (Brayer et al. 1989, Bernstein et al. 2012; Kocher et al. 1997; Veitz-keenan & Keenan 2017) as well as with the results of the study by Lambert et al. (1997) which reported that clinicians who placed more than 50 implants were 2 times more likely to have a better clinical outcome compared with inexperienced clinicians.
The full text of the paper by Sonkar et al. (2019) is available here.
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Sonkar, J., Maney, P., Yu, Q. et al. Retrospective study to identify associations between clinician training and dental implant outcome and to compare the use of MATLAB with SAS. Int J Implant Dent 5, 28 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40729-019-0182-6
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