Alveolar ridge preservation (ARP)

After a tooth is removed, the alveolar ridge remodels and loses width and height. Alveolar ridge preservation is any intervention performed in the fresh socket to reduce that loss so that an implant can later be placed without, or with less, additional augmentation. In practice this most often means packing a particulate graft — xenograft, allograft or a synthetic — into the socket and covering it with a collagen membrane, a collagen plug or a free gingival graft.

The 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis by Avila-Ortiz and colleagues found that ARP interventions reduce, but do not prevent, the horizontal and vertical dimensional loss that follows extraction compared with unassisted healing. The 2021 Cochrane review of ARP techniques rated the certainty of the available evidence for most comparisons as low.

“Socket preservation” and “ridge preservation” describe the same procedure; the literature has largely settled on “alveolar ridge preservation”.

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An open socket, with bleeding and no walls on one side, is one of the scenarios in which clinicians describe loose particulate graft as difficult to contain. Whether a cohesive matrix changes that is a development question, not a demonstrated result; see how the composition is designed and graft displacement.