Endosseous dental implants are a commonly accepted treatment procedure and showed high survival and success rates as well as good functional performance in numerous clinical trials and retrospective analyses, also for Conelog implants as for their specific implant surface [17, 23, 26]. However, in general, one could argue that results of controlled clinical studies do not reflect the real situation in daily dental practice, and every implant design and surface should be evaluated individually. Thus, this observational multicenter study was instigated to estimate the survival of these implants with internal conical implant-abutment connection in daily practice conditions with a great number of patients over 5 years. According to the study protocol, minimal exclusion criteria were applied in the selection of study participants alongside the usual contraindications and the technical procedure among the centers was not standardized to reflect daily practice. As a result, study participants recruited were heterogeneous as typically seen in daily dental practices to reflect the performance of these implants seen under these conditions.

After an observation period of 5- to 7-years post-loading, the implants demonstrated good performance with respect to implant survival. From the 122 implants restored, three implants (implant mobility and peri-implantitis) were lost, resulting in a cumulative proportion survival rate of 96.6% (Kaplan-Meier). Thus, although the selection of study participants was less stringent, the survival rate of implants and their corresponding prosthetic components in daily dental practices was very similar compared with randomized clinical studies over 5 years like Messias et al. [27], 96.6% with no difference between platform switching and platform matching abutments, or with the randomized controlled clinical study of Ioannidis et al. [4] resulting in a survival rate of 96.1% of the implants. In a meta-analysis over 5 years performed by Jung et al. [28] with more than 2000 patients, the survival of implants supporting single crowns was found to be 97.2%, and at 10 years 95.2%. The survival rate shown in this study is also comparable with other real-life data. An interesting approach in generally determining the efficacy of implants was undertaken by Seemann et al. [29]: In this retrospective study of the real-life return rate of 69,377 sold implants to the manufacturers all over Austria a return rate of 2.78%, i.e., survival rate of 97.22%, was demonstrated. But it has to be taken into account that this specific survival rate is based only on returned implants, which were considered by the treating doctors to be justifiable for reimbursement by the manufacturers.