Effect of Free Gingival Grafting on Peri-implant Health

The primary goal of treating peri-implant mucositis (PM) is to disturb the dental implant biofilm and resolve inflammatory conditions. This aims to achieve treatment success or complete disease resolution, preventing its progression to peri-implantitis. Indeed, regardless of the non-surgical mechanical/physical instrumentation approaches and despite noticeable clinical improvements, none of the existing procedures would result in complete disease resolution \[i.e., absence of bleeding on probing (BOP)\] in peri-implant mucositis. Taking this into account, the execution of interventions targeted at managing modifiable risk factors plays a pivotal role in maintaining peri-implant health. Despite the increasing evidence documenting that implant sites exhibiting either a lacking or a reduced keratinized mucosa (KM) of ≤2 mm demonstrate difficulties in eliminating bacterial biofilm, leading to inflammation around the soft tissue, the requirement for a minimum peri-implant KM width (KMW) to avoid peri-implant diseases has been a highly debated topic. Indeed, KM augmentation at implant sites with a reduced KMW has been reported to be associated with statistically significant lower plaque and gingival scores as well as peri-implant probing depths (PPD) when compared with non-augmented sites. However, there is no study evaluating primarily the effect of KM augmentation on maintaining peri-implant health and preventing peri-implant diseases. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the impact of soft tissue phenotype modification following free gingival grafting in addition to the non-surgical submarginal instrumentation of peri-implant mucositis over a 6-month follow-up period.