How Dental Implants Preserve Your Smile
Patients with gum disease often wind up needing replacement teeth at some point in their treatment process, especially if symptoms have not been diagnosed until the disease has progressed significantly. Missing teeth won’t make your gum disease symptoms worse, but they do present another set of oral health complications on their own, and promptly replacing missing teeth is the best way to keep those issues from arising so you and your periodontist can focus on treating gum disease. For most patients, dental implants provide a permanent and easy to care for solution to missing teeth.
Dangers of Missing Teeth
When you lose teeth and do not make replace them in the mouth, several things happen over time.
- Remaining teeth move apart to occupy the open space
- Widening gaps between teeth allow them to loosen and misalign
- Gum tissue erosion from lack of stimulation in the area with missing teeth
- Pain and difficulty eating certain foods
- Changes to speech and enunciation
Most of these changes are permanent, but they take time to become noticeable. If you replace the missing teeth before too much movement or tissue loss happens, you can preserve your smile as it was before the loss and maintain your lifestyle without dietary changes.
Why Dental Implants?
Bridge work and dentures are also available for patients with missing teeth, but your periodontist is likely to recommend implants if you are a candidate. That’s because implants are permanent if they are properly cared for. It’s also because implants are strong enough that patients do not typically need dietary modification to avoid damaging them, and they provide the same tissue stimulation to the gums and jaw that natural teeth provide.
If you are interested in learning more about dental implants for your missing teeth contact us! Modern implants can work on any number of missing teeth, from a single tooth to a whole arch.