What Happens When You Lose A Tooth
I’m Dr. Grey Kantor, here with Kantor Dental Group, Aesthetic Dentistry and Implantology. Today I want to talk about what happens when you lose a tooth. You don’t just lose the tooth. A lot of things happen surrounding that tooth that can be hard to do an implant or a bridge later on, so it’s important to know the consequences of losing a tooth. Our teeth are only held into place because of the teeth surrounding it on either side, as well as the teeth it’s biting on, and your cheek and your tongue. If you didn’t have a cheek, your teeth would fall outward. If you didn’t have a tongue, your teeth would go inward. All these anatomical structures really hold our teeth into place. Let’s see what happens if you lose a tooth.
Say you lose this tooth right here with the red X on it. The teeth around it will start to tilt inward, and the top tooth will start to come downward. Another thing that happens is the bone right here begins to go downward as well, creating less and less bone to work with, say if you wanted to do an implant. If you want to do a bridge in this case, it would also be difficult because in order to prepare for the bridge, you may cause the necessity of a root canal, because of how tilted the teeth are. So that’s one thing… That’s actually three things that happen when you lose a tooth. The teeth start to tilt, the top teeth come down, and the bone starts to resorb down where the tooth was.
The last thing that happens is something called pneumatization. Pneumatization has to do with the top teeth, so say you’re missing a top tooth and just beneath the top teeth is what’s called the sinus. That’s this area right here. So you have the sinus right there, which is also only keeps its shape due to the teeth surrounding it. If there’s no tooth there, it’ll end up resorbing, just like the bottom teeth. This is, instead of resorbing from the part where the teeth is, it’s resorbing from the back side where the root is. You can see here, pneumatization is where the bone resorbs from the sinus and you lose bone structure in order to place the implant. As you can see, placing an implant in this area would be very difficult because there’s very little bone right there to hold the initial placement. This would require a sinus graft in order to put an implant there.
If you have any more questions about this or would like to know more about what happens after you lose a tooth, definitely come see us at Kantor Dental Group. I’m Dr. Grey Kantor, Kantor Dental Group, Aesthetic Dentistry and Implantology. Thanks for watching, and please subscribe.
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drgrey
on Oct 21st, 2016
6:29 am
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Tags: Cheek, Pneumatization, Sinus, Tongue, Tooth
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