How Orthodontics Changes Your Teeth
Crooked teeth and bite problems do more than interrupt your smile. They can cause gum disease, create tooth wear, increase risk for tooth injury, trigger chewing difficulties and more. Studies also show that your smile is one of the top three things that another person will notice about you. You want that smile to both make an impression and you want your smile to be healthy. Unhealthy smiles are ones that tend to have the teeth fall out over time, and once that happens, you can’t get your teeth back. Orthodontics can help improve a smile in countless ways. Here are some major ways that orthodontics can change your teeth and how the process works!
Crooked Teeth: How Can They Affect a Smile?
If you have crooked teeth, you might want them straighter for more aesthetic appeal. However, your oral health is what actually improves the most. That’s because crooked teeth will give you a significantly greater risk for oral health diseases.
The American Association of Orthodontists recommends that every child has their first appointment with an orthodontist by age 7 or 8. This is a time when the baby teeth are starting to fall out and the permanent, adult teeth are starting to come in. An orthodontist can see if those adult teeth are coming in correctly or if there are orthodontic issues starting to form that will be there for life without intervention. The permanent teeth will generally be in the mouth by ages 12-14 and a teen will have 32 teeth. That includes 4 wisdom teeth that will still be hidden in the mouth.
Making sure that all the teeth come in where they should is vital to having a healthy mouth. When the teeth are shifted out of place or crooked, they can break or fracture easier. Speech can be affected or it can become difficult to form words correctly. The teeth should form an arch both on top and bottom in an adult’s and child’s mouth. When it doesn’t, speech impediments ensue and some issues can even hinder eating and drinking, which can lead to malnutrition and disability.
Oral health issues caused by simple crookedness can end up being major issues without intervention. We care about these issues because not correcting the oral issues through orthodontics will mean we keep seeing the same children and adults in our office for cavities, gum disease, tooth breaks, root canals, extractions and other procedures.
Why Straighten Your Teeth?
Countless studies have been done for the effectiveness of orthodontics and how your oral health benefits. What all of those studies have concluded is that orthodontics can benefit a smile where crooked teeth exist. Not only do they clear up the speech issues, but they reduce the risk for prevalent tooth decay and gum disease issues that happen.
Already, studies show that about 42% of children have tooth decay, or cavities. By adulthood, more than 92% of people will have had decay in their teeth. More than 64.7 million American adults—not counting children—will have gum disease in one of the 3 stages. Most Americans have some form of gingivitis and they don’t know it.
Crooked teeth provide so many pockets where bacteria and plaque can fester and decay that your risk for so many oral health issues skyrocket on top of the statistics that are already there for the average American. For health reasons alone, you should consider orthodontics to straighten your teeth. You will also want to consider the aesthetics of a better smile, as those studies show promising results as well.
A Great Smile Helps You
Did you know that your smile is one of the first features others notice? Your smile can say a lot about how healthy you are. Invisalign conducted a study comparing healthy, straight smiles to crooked smiles. From hundreds of observers, they found that people with healthier, straighter smiles were perceived better than those with an unhealthy or crooked smile:
- 1/3rd of people notice your teeth before any other facial feature.
- Straighter, healthier teeth made people 45% more likely to be hired for a job.
- People perceived others as 58% more wealthy, successful and more likely to get a date.
- Healthier smiles made a person 73% more trustworthy than someone who didn’t care for their smiles.
Your smile says a ton! So you want to keep it healthy and you want to keep it straight so you save money in the long run and so you keep your teeth and gums intact. Braces in the form of Invisalign treatment, lingual braces, ceramic braces or traditional metal braces will shift the teeth by minute increments over 18-24 months. Small bits of tension placed on the teeth with these devices will cause breakups in the structures underneath your teeth that hold them in place. Over time, those structures will reform over and over as the teeth move more and more into a straighter position. Once straight, the devices are removed and the teeth stay in that position.
What If You Can’t Do Orthodontics?
Don’t have 18-24 months to invest in orthodontics? Technology has come a long way since the invention of orthodontics. You do have other options such as porcelain veneers if you need a straight smile quickly. Veneers are custom-made tooth shells that replace the front sliver of your natural tooth. It creates a natural-looking perfect smile in 2 office visits and is the type of dental service many celebrities use to get their perfect smiles. If you want to know more about how dentistry and orthodontics work together or have questions about porcelain veneers, call Dr. Evanson’s office today at (720) 409-0008!
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