Immediate versus delayed dental implant placement: an umbrella review protocol.

Abstract

Immediate dental implant placement has been proposed as a strategy to reduce treatment time and improve patient satisfaction. However, systematic reviews addressing immediate versus delayed implant placement have reported inconsistent findings, limiting clinical interpretability. An umbrella review is warranted to synthesise, appraise and contextualise the existing evidence. This umbrella review will include systematic reviews with or without meta-analysis comparing immediate implant placement after tooth extraction with delayed placement in healed sites. Comprehensive searches will be conducted in September 2026, in PubMed/Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE), Embase, Scopus, Web of Science, LILACS, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Methodological quality will be assessed using A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR 2). Overlap of primary studies will be quantified using the corrected covered area. Outcomes of interest include implant survival, success and failure rates, biological and technical complications, patient-reported outcomes and surgical time. A structured narrative synthesis will be performed. This overview does not require ethics approval, as it uses secondary data from previously published studies. The results will be disseminated through the publication in a high-impact journal. OSF REGISTRATION NUMBER: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GZ3DR.