The loss of a natural tooth due to decay or trauma can impact the comfort of your chewing and your self-esteem. But the loss of the tooth can also impact your jawbone health. A natural tooth's roots offer important stimulation that keeps the bone's cells and nerves flowing and reproducing. If the stimulation leaves with the tooth, the jawbone can quickly start to deteriorate.
Deteriorating jawbone can threaten the health of nearby teeth and make it harder for your dentist to install certain dental replacements like dental implants or dentures. If you have recently lost a tooth, there are a few ways that your general or family dentistry specialist can help minimize your loss of jawbone health.
Dental Implant
If the tooth loss is so recent that no jawbone deterioration has occurred yet, you might want to consider having a dental implant installed. The dental implant will give you a natural looking and feeling tooth that will improve both your chewing comfort and your smile. But the implant's metal root that inserts into the jawbone also offers similar stimulation as a natural tooth, which means that an implant can help maintain your existing bone health.
The entire implant process does take a number of months due to the dentist needing to wait until the bone completely heals around the root. But the metal root is the first step and will immediately start to offer you those bone health benefits.
If you lost your tooth a while ago and some deterioration has already occurred, you might still qualify for a dental implant if you are willing to go through a bone graft first.
Bone Graft
A bone graft procedure implants donor bone from you or an outside source into weakened areas in your jawbone. The grafted bone and original bone will fuse together over a healing period. But if you don't get jawbone stimulation into the area soon, the graft will also deteriorate over time.
While a dental implant would offer the best bone health promotion, implants aren't always the best choice for every patient. You might also qualify for implant-supported partial or full dentures depending on the total number of missing teeth. These styles of dentures, known as overdentures, will still offer the stability and health promotion of the implants but you won't have to receive one artificial crown at a time.
Sinus Lift
When you lose a tooth on your upper jaw, the potential jawbone deterioration has another risk: falling sinus cavity. The sinus cavity runs parallel to your upper jaw and is held into place by the bone. If the bone deteriorates, the cavity can drop down out of its position and cause you pain and headaches while also standing in the direct way of your receiving a dental implant root.
The dentist can fix this problem with a sinus lift which is essentially just a bone graft performed after the sinus cavity is lifted out of the way. The healing graft will keep the sinus propped up where it belongs.
Share7 November 2016
My son was outside playing with some friends when he accidentally fell down and hit his mouth on the sidewalk. The fall knocked out his front tooth, so I immediately placed the tooth in a small jar and added some milk. I rushed my son to the dental clinic and the dentist immediately took us into the examination room. The dentist placed the tooth back into the socket and saved it. My name is Beverly Tillman and thanks to the quick work of the dentist, my son didn't lose his tooth. Since this was a scary time for me and my son, I wanted to write this blog as a source of information for other parents who are facing a dental emergency. First of all, don't panic and get to your dentist as soon as possible. I hope this blog will help to answer your questions about dental emergencies.