Soft tissue reactions around percutaneous implants: a clinical study of soft tissue conditions around skin-penetrating titanium implants for bone-anchored hearing aids.

Some patients with hearing impairment cannot use conventional hearing aids. One solution for these patients is the use of bone conduction hearing aids; however, this kind of equipment is associated with several problems related to the necessity for a good contact between the transducer and the temporal bone. Direct bone contact would be an ideal solution provided that safe and reaction-free skin penetration and a safe and permanent bone anchorage could be achieved. Brånemark et al have developed a procedure to furnish edentulous patients with fixed bridges using titanium implants. This report is focused on the clinical status of the soft tissue adjacent to the 67 skin-penetrating devices in 60 patients. The patients have been followed between 3 and 96 months on 313 occasions, which represents a total observation time of 1515 months of clinical performance. Only one implant was extracted due to adverse skin reaction, giving a failure rate of 0.07% per month. This is comparable with the failure rate of cardiac pacemakers 0.02-0.04% per month).