The Issues That Arise From a Missing Tooth
What You’ll Learn:
- How a missing tooth can change the alignment of your teeth.
- Why it’s important to replace a missing tooth ASAP, preferably within 6-12 months of extraction.
- Why you should choose Choice Dental for your needs!
Transcript for Why It’s Necessary to Replace a Tooth After Tooth Extraction;
Dr. Charlie Sung: Hey, how are you doing, it’s Charlie from Choice Dental. Today we’re going to talk about what happens to your mouth after you have a tooth removed.
So, the other consequences of having a missing tooth, and you know, basically having a gap. So, we’re going to use this diagram on the iPad to help explain what happens. This is a tooth that is about to get removed, the one with the big red cross in it. It’s going to get removed for whatever reason, whether it’s infection, or pain, or um, just badly broken.
Here it goes, and it’s extracted. Then what happens over the next, you know, few years and maybe decades, it’s very slow but it does happen, is that basically the neighboring teeth can tilt into the gap. You can think of teeth like, you know, books on a bookshelf; you take one away the other ones can tip and tilt. In this kind of example, here the teeth will tilt into the space potentially. You can see the neighbors are, like, tilted sideways, and because they’ve moved over the years, a gap forms here which can trap food and that basically can increase the risk of decay down here, as well because of the gum loss that happens around a tooth when you lose the tooth.
In addition, you have the top tooth. If you notice, the top tooth moves as well. The top tooth generally needs a partner to chew against, and when the partner is gone, the top teeth will just keep growing down until it touches something. So the top tooth, you can see, it just starts to grow down, and potentially it can get decay as well, because you’ll find that food may trap in this area.
That’s kind of like the consequences of having a missing tooth long term. This is all just a cartoon, but in real life, this is, you know, one example. In this person, they had their top tooth removed a long time ago, the bottom tooth has grown up slowly, and because of that it’s hanging higher than the rest of them, which is a problem. Now in this other example, this is an x-ray, you have some teeth that are straight, and then there’s a missing tooth here. Over time, the teeth behind the missing teeth have tilted, and so tilted you can kind of see that they’re sideways instead of straight. Now, the problem with the teeth tilting as well is that it kind of tilts into the space where the tooth would be, and it makes it hard to replace the missing tooth later if the tilting is really bad.
In this case, this person, you know, wanted a couple of teeth replaced where they had some teeth lost in the past, and then because of the teeth tilting they couldn’t do that straight away, they had to undo the tilting first. In this example, the person had to undergo braces to upright the teeth. There’s a bit more space here to replace the missing teeth, and then once the braces were done, a new tooth was replaced in the gap. Here is an implant, and here is a bridge.
We always recommend that if you’re going to lose a tooth, try to replace it as soon as possible, ideally within maybe six to twelve months, just to prevent the teeth from tipping in the first place. That also helps you chew again faster as well.
Alright, hope that clears things up. In our next video, we’ll talk about other ways to replace missing teeth, but, yeah, this video is just to talk about what happens to your mouth after a tooth is removed. Alright, thank you!
