There are many reasons you can lose a single tooth, or in some cases, many teeth. Trauma, decay and gum disease are the most common. After loosing a tooth, the space left can cause many short and long term problems.
In the case of a single lost tooth, the surrounding teeth can begin to drift and the patient may experience increased loading during chewing, which in turn can lead to problems and further tooth loss or damage. When multiple teeth are lost the remaining teeth become over loaded leading to further tooth loss.
Most importantly loosing a tooth can mean that chewing becomes more difficult, leading to effects on general health and quality of life.
The loss of teeth can cause many problems:
- Loss of confidence and self esteem
- Avoidance of social activities (especially eating out)
- Poor chewing
- Altered speech
- Drifting of the remaining teeth
- Increased wear and damage to the remaining teeth
- Premature loss of the remaining teeth
- Reduced muscle tone in the jaw and premature sagging of the skin
- Loss of bone structure and gum tissue
- Muscle tiredness and headaches
We often meet with new patients who have lost teeth over a long period of time. By the time they come in for a consultation they have lost multiple teeth and are suffering from many of the problems associate with tooth loss. All of these cases have lost bone and gum and require multiple dental implants.
If patients were given the advice to replace teeth as they are lost, fewer of them would end up in this predicament.
It is usually fairly straight forward to replace a single tooth around the time it has been lost, as there has been much less bone loss at the site, and this means the surrounding teeth are unaffected by the loss of a tooth nearby.
If the patients we see were given the advice when they lost only one or two teeth to have them replaced they would have avoided the complex treatment they now have to undertake.
Our advice is, always consider replacing a missing tooth with a dental implant after it is lost, it will save money and treatment complexity in the long term. Read our blog all about which treatment option is best for you here.
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