Insufficient alveolar bone volume, as a result of periodontal disease, trauma, congenital anomalies and/or resorption atrophy, often presents a clinical challenge for optimal placement of dental implants for prosthetic rehabilitation. In such cases, augmentation of alveolar bone, with either autologous bone, allogeneic, xenogeneic, or alloplastic biomaterials, is a prerequisite for placing implants in restoratively and esthetically acceptable positions.

Limited alveolar ridge defects are solved by local grafting. In cases of larger defects and extreme resorption, larger grafts are necessary. The most common donor site for large autologous bone grafts is the iliac crest, due to its accessibility, comparatively abundant bone volume, and high bone quality [1].

Autologous bone is still considered as a “gold standard” for alveolar reconstruction, according to systematic reviews [2,3,4,5]. Intra-oral donor sites, like mandibular ramus and symphysis, allow harvesting of limited volumes of autologous bone. The anterior iliac crest is the preferred extra-oral donor site for alveolar augmentation for larger bone volumes [1, 6, 7]. However, complications are reported, including pain, gait disturbance, hematomas, paranesthesia, and infections [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15].

Traditionally, objective clinical variables, like the amount of bone gain (in millimeters) after augmentation, are reported as outcome measures after surgical procedures in clinical studies [16]. Patients’ experiences like patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) have been increasingly used as a measure of treatment effect after medical and dental therapies [17, 18]. Importantly, these measures reflect the patients’ perceptions of the treatment outcome in addition to conventional clinical measures. Nowadays, Norwegian authorities address clinicians to include patients’ perspective in decisions regarding different treatment modalities [19]. It has been suggested that PROMs such as treatment satisfaction, perceived cost-effectiveness, and quality of life (QoL) may be more important and relevant to patients’ daily lives than objective clinical measures [16, 20]. Patient satisfaction is an important outcome measure, related to, although not synonymous with QoL, as satisfaction tends to reflect the process, rather than the outcome, of care [21]. Thus, an increase in the use of PROMs has been highlighted in dental implant research [22].