If you’ve lost teeth, or are about to have some extracted, you’re facing many new limitations. You might only be able to eat soft foods because eating anything else causes you discomfort. You might not be able to speak clearly and naturally. You can smile but the idea embarrasses you—especially if the missing teeth are in your smile zone. Your face may even take on a sunken, aged appearance if your tooth loss leads to bone recession.
There are many solutions to recover your smile, including dental bridges and dental implants, which offer the function and aesthetics of real teeth, jaw protection, and unequaled longevity. You may be surprised at how quickly you’re able to eat, speak, laugh, and smile again once your teeth are replaced by our team at Advanced Implant Centers. If you have failing or missing teeth in Louisville, KY, reach out, we’ll help you find the tooth replacement solution you need for a complete, confident, and healthy smile.
If treatment like root canals, gum disease treatment, and restorative dentistry are ineffective, damaged, infected, and failing teeth, should be removed to protect your dental health and even systemic health. Unless they’re wisdom teeth or extra teeth that are causing overcrowding in your mouth, most teeth should be replaced after removal. Apart from the ways tooth loss can decrease your quality of life, it can also trigger a sort of “domino effect” in your health. Without natural tooth roots stimulating healthy bone growth, your bone will begin to deteriorate beneath the empty tooth socket. This will spread and can even lead to additional tooth loss in adjacent teeth. Replacing your tooth before extensive bone loss can occur will help prevent unnecessary additional harm as well as the need for bone grafting procedures. If your bone is stable enough or has received bone reconstructive treatment, you’ll have the option between dental bridges, dentures, and dental implants for your new, complete smile.
For one missing tooth or a series of missing teeth, dental bridges are frequently the first solution many patients think of. Dental bridges are made of a series of crowns that span the gap left behind by tooth loss. Requiring one or more adjacent teeth as the foundation of the bridge, called the abutment teeth, this solution requires that we remove some of the enamel of this tooth, or teeth, when placing your dental bridge.
The con to this approach is now you have to involve the adjacent teeth and damage them by stripping off the enamel. The bone under the area of the missing tooth will resorb over time. The long-term success of the bridge is many years less than a dental implant.
Dentures are a time-tested, economical solution to tooth loss. They fit over your gums and stay in place either through suction or adhesive creams but can also be removed. You can have full or partial dentures; full dentures cover entire arches of teeth, essentially replacing all your teeth while partial dentures take the place of a few missing teeth in a row or throughout an arch.
The con of this procedure is now you do not have stable teeth. Food may become lodged under the denture and cause pain and discomfort. This is the equivalent to walking with a rock in your shoe. Most importantly, the areas of removed teeth begin losing the bone structure causing premature aging, loose fitting dentures and possibly more extensive dental implant work in the future due to continued bone loss.
Many people cannot wear an upper denture due to problems of the gag reflex and the lower is almost always unstable and difficult to wear.
For additional stability, dentures can be anchored in your jawbone by dental implants. Implant supported dentures won’t slip as much or irritate your gums as much and offer healthy bone stimulation in the areas of implant placement. They also enable you to eat a greater variety of foods than standard dentures do.
Implant supported dentures are much better than a conventional denture, but maintenance is required for replacing the connections routinely every 6 months, they can still have food lodge underneath causing pain and the stress level on the implant is much higher causing a greater probability of implant failure. Dr. Schroering will not use this method on the upper jaw due to the much higher failure rate of this procedure, but he will place a full fixed option that eliminates these probable problems.
The best overall tooth replacement option available today is dental implants. They are the most natural-looking solution that can also last decades with proper care. Dental implants can replace one tooth, multiple teeth, or a full arch of teeth. Comprised partly of artificial tooth roots, they protect your jawbone from deterioration and thus your facial shape from changing. What’s more, they allow you to eat anything you want—hard foods, sticky foods, chewy foods, and whatever your favorites might be.
Teeth fully supported by dental implants is always your best option for comfort, esthetics and probable life-time health of the implants. Performed with Zirconia restorations, this option may provide a life-time set of teeth that will not wear down over the years.
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