Esthetic outcome of single implant crowns following type 1 and type 3 implant placement: a systematic review.

Objective The aim of the current review was to systematically appraise the esthetic outcome of soft tissue around single implant crowns following type 1 and type 3 implants placement in published dental literature. Materials and methods A PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials search up to March 2013 was conducted for articles published in the dental literature and limited to human trials with no language restricted. Furthermore, the reference lists of related articles were systematically screened, and additional manual searches were also performed. The primary outcome was pink esthetics score (PES). Results The electronic search in the database of PubMed, Embase, and the Cohrane Central Register of Controlled Trials resulted in the identification of 463 titles. These titles were initially screened by the two independent reviewers for possible inclusion. Screening the abstracts and titles led to 28 articles for future full-text consideration. From these articles, 18 studies were excluded. Manual search identified one article. After quality assessment, eight studies were included in this review. This review showed that no significant difference of PES index could be found between type 1 and type 3 implant placement. Conclusion According to the current evidence, short-term esthetic outcomes of peri-implant soft tissue did not show significant difference following type 1 and type 3 implants placement with well-selected patients. However, caution should be taken for clinicians to extrapolate this result to all types of patients, as more randomized clinical trials are needed for long-term soft-tissue esthetic outcome in patients with high esthetic risk following type 1 implant placement. PES frequency, peri-implant condition and other risk factors for peri-implantitis are recommended to be reported for future studies.