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A person suffers from a stroke. He is unable to move his limbs on one side of his body. What happens to the muscles there? They start to atrophy or wither. This is well-known. Not as well-known, is the fact that when you lose a tooth, the same withering thing will happen to your jaw bone which used to have something to support. Below is a Blu Tack simulation.
  Our teeth are supported by gums and bone. When the tooth is present, the bony ridge is nice and wide. Immediately after extraction, you'll see a socket filled with blood clot. Underneath the blood clot, is your bare bone. Osteoclasts, osteoblasts, fibroblasts and other Greek-sounding cells start to busy themselves with the job of healing.
  Your gums close in on the socket and the bone inside gradually remodels itself. With nothing to support, the bone starts to cut costs and shrink. 6 months after extraction, the bone becomes considerably narrower than the tooth it used to support.
  6 years after extraction, you may end up with a knife-edged ridge on which you can only stand a pin. Bone is not the only stuff engaged in the business of resorption and remodelling. Neighbouring teeth may start to help themselves to the territory vacated by the extracted tooth. How do you restore these gaps? With great difficulty. Orthodontic treatment and expensive bone-grafting surgery may be required when you've finally decided to fill that gap. Ideally, one should prevent tooth extraction. If it's unavoidable, then the next thing you should do is to prevent bone resorption soon after extraction. There are some products out on the market which help dentists prevent bone resorption. The video below shows one of them.
However, at New Age Cosmetic Dentists, we believe that the best way to prevent bone loss is the immediate placement of the dental implant in the extraction socket. Conditions which do not allow the immediate placement of the dental implant (infection, socket not intact, soft tissue socket etc) would usually also preclude the use of other socket preservation methods. In such cases, we recommend implant placement about 2 months after extraction. In this way, we can arrest the bone loss as well as the "territorial violation" early.
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