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I re-read the paper now that the AAE was making such a big deal out of it. It a comparitive study of a perio practice and and endo practice. Each pulled about 140 charts randomly and looked at success and outcomes over 3-5 years. My main concern was that we were comparing initial endo therapy to implant therapy, which anyone would hopefully agree have the same outcome. They actually included endodontic retreatements in the study which was very respectible but did not say how many retreatments were in the study. The implant vs endo discussion has to compare retreatment success to implant success to really provide guidance for treatment planning decisions, but even if endo retreatment is less predictable when you have a failed endo you at least have something you can work with in terms of bone which is not the same for implants. They also looked at implant interventions but they did not catergorize the implant complications and give any insight to what types of problems that had. I buy into the idea that properly restored endodontic therapy done by a specialist has the a very good long term prognosis. Many people who think endo is unpredictable are the ones that are only treating the ones that fail with implants - no the ones that are successful. Think about it - was a periodontist ever referred a tooth with successful RCT for replacement? I have sat through so many implant lectures where a speaker shows case after case of failed implants where a trained endo eye sees gross errors (missed canals, short fills, etc) and the speaker replaced all these teeth with implants.