Dental Implant News for Sun City: What Your Dentist Can Tell About Your General Health, PART 1

This two-part article series explains the signs and symptoms your mouth could exhibit when your body suffers from stress, illness or disease.

No one expects much to be revealed about their lifestyle, standard of living or general health when they go to the dentist for a standard check-up. But according to Sun City dental implants surgeons, the state of your teeth and gums tell dental healthcare professionals a whole lot about how healthy you are! Your mouth is your body’s more important ingress and so, it stands to reason that if your mouth is diseased, the rest of your body is far more susceptible to infection and disease, too.

In this two-part article series, we shall be exploring the link between our oral health and our general health and the many diseases and conditions an ailing mouth may indicate. By responding quickly to these signs, potentially fatal diseases can be diagnosed and treated in their beginning stages, thereby vastly improving your chances of a complete recovery.

Let’s begin…

Worn, Ground Down Teeth

"Topviewtooth". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The picture shown above provides a bird’s eye view of a tooth that has been so eroded and ground down that the structure of the tooth beneath the dental enamel has been revealed. Here we can see the softer, yellow dentine and the pulp chamber, where the tooth’s nerves and blood vessels are contained. You can even see vertical cracks and fractures where the tooth structure has given in to stress.

“The incredible damage this patient has done to his or her teeth has resulted in the need for most of them to be extracted and replaced with implants,” says a Arizona dental implant surgeon. “The condition that can lead to this kind of damage is termed Bruxism and unless you are diagnosed and fitted with a mouth guard to wear at night or when you most often grind your teeth, you could completely destroy your dentition.”

What Does Bruxism Reveal About Your General Health?

The precise cause of teeth grinding and jaw clenching are not known, but these habits are believe to be associated with a stressful lifestyle and typically present in patients who are anxious and who struggle to cope with stress. As such, with only a brief examination of your teeth, dental implant surgeons in Sun City can tell just what kind of lifestyle it is you lead and how well you are coping with the levels of stress you experience on a daily basis.

What’s unnerving about Bruxism is that it’s a condition that typically strikes at night whilst you’re asleep! How can you control this damage if you aren’t even conscious about doing it? You can’t control the compulsion to grind your teeth and clench your jaw, especially if it’s nocturnal. What you can do is have a retainer custom fitted, which you wear to bed every night. This will help to prevent the extensive damage Bruxism can do to the biting surfaces of your teeth.

Stay Tuned for Part 2

To find out more about what dental implant surgeons can tell about the general health of Arizona residents from the state of their mouths, stay tuned for the second half of this two-part article series.