Replacement teeth need not be a grind

It’s not uncommon for your teeth to start failing in middle age, especially if you grind your teeth at night and have not worn a mouth guard. If your dentist says you must have one of your back teeth extracted, you may be wondering how that is going to affect you.

The good news is that it need hardly affect you at all, if you have dental implants in Oxfordshire fitted to replace that lost tooth. In Oxfordshire, dental implants are increasingly popular as a tooth replacement system because they do more than replace the crown, they replace the root as well.

At Chipping Norton Dental Implant Centre in Oxfordshire, having a replacement root can make a huge difference to your other teeth, your diet, and the future of your jaw and facial structure.

Dental Implants in OxfordshireWhat missing teeth do to your jawbone

The roots of our teeth play a vital role in maintaining the size and density of our jawbones. Their presence in the jawbone stimulates its renewal. Without tooth roots there, trembling slightly in their sockets signalling to the bone that it is still needed, the jawbone does not bother to make new bone to replace old worn out bone. And so, your jawbone shrinks back.

The area around the lost tooth becomes less dense. Not only that but the roots of each of our teeth act as a support to the other teeth around them, and when one goes missing its neighbours can become loose and start to tip into the gap, perhaps even fall out of the jawbone altogether.

The unpleasantness of a soft food diet

Losing one tooth might not particularly affect your diet, but if its neighbours become loose and fall out too, you may not be able to eat food that you need to chew. This means that nutritious raw fruit and vegetables, nuts and meat, can go out the window. You’ll be left with a soft food diet and may find it harder to get enough nutrients into your body.

Have an ask around and you may soon discover that quite a few of your friends in their 40s have already had dental implants in Oxfordshire. They may seem like a big investment, but they can last a lifetime.