Gum disease, pyorrhea, periodontitis, a rose by any other name....

So what exactly is gum disease and can I explain it easily enough for anyone to understand?  I think so.

I'm sure you have heard of plaque and tartar.  It's mentioned in all the toothpaste ads.  Plaque is the soft stuff on your teeth that can come off with a toothbrush.  Tartar ( or what we dentists call "calculus"- not the math by the way) is the hard stuff you cannot brush off.  It's found above the gum line where you can see it and below where you cannot.  Tartar...to put it indelicately... has to be scrapped off.  We dentists call this "scaling".   Now bacteria live in the plaque and tartar.  They produce among other things toxins that break down the gum tissue attachment to the teeth and cause the bone that holds the teeth to shrink away.  As it becomes more severe, your teeth become loose and you if left untreated the affected teeth will be lost.  That in a nut shell is gum disease.  It is generally painless.  Bleeding swollen red gums are often seen.  Some times you cannot tell you suffer from it to look at your gums.

gum disease © Dr Steven Rosenblat

So how do we dentists know it's there? 

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays 2011...

Well it's that time of year again.  The holidays are upon us and everyone here at Oakdale Dental in beautiful Oakville Ontario, want to wish you all Happy Holidays and a healthy New Year! 

I want to say thank you to may patients for trusting us with their dental health this past year and for referring friends and family for their dental care.  And I'd also like to say thank you to you, my blog readers for spending a bit of your valuable time reading my posts. 

We look forward to seeing all your familiar smiling faces again in 2012!

Dr Steven Rosenblat & Team.

Staff xmas party with with the Oakville dentist

How long will a (dental) bridge last?

I was at a great lecture last week at the Toronto Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.  The speaker was one of the gurus we all line up to hear; Dr Carl Misch.  He was talking about dental implants. 

Before we could replace missing teeth with dental implants, the most lifelike way to replace missing teeth was to make a "bridge".  Now you can only have a bridge if there are teeth on either side of the space where the lost teeth were.  These teeth have to anchor the replacement faux teeth and to do that we have to shape them as if they were to be crowned.  Now this isn't without risks - see below.   Dr Steven Rosenblat Oakville Dentst This is not to say you should avoid a crown or bridge but if you have an alternative treatment option that will give you a better result than a bridge, why involve the teeth adjacent to space from missing teeth?

So why do non removable dental bridges fail? 

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Why take X Rays of children?

Well I'm sure most of you know that dentists take radiographs or "xrays" to look for cavities.  And of course we can often see infections in the bone around teeth on xrays too.  But another reason to take xrays of children is to see if their adult teeth are present, developing normally and if they are in the correct location.

This young girl is 9 years old.  Her mom was missing some upper teeth that never formed but her daughter is missing lowers!  Lots going on here and it can be confusing to look at.  There are many teeth developing underneath baby teeth. The arrows show the area where there are two adult teeth missing.  They never developed.

panoramic xray of a 9 year oldIt is important to know if all permenant teeth are present in children so we know if the baby teeth are going to be replaced by adult teeth.  If not, do we need to plan braces (orthodontics) to move teeth to close the spaces where adult teeth should have been or should we work hard to keep the baby teeth for the long haul.  I've had patients who have been able to keep baby teeth well into their 30's and 40's.  But sometimes they cannot be kept that long.  If we can keep a baby tooth until past 18 years old, if it fails we can replace it with a dental implant and crown, just as if the adult tooth had developed!  But knowledge is the key, if we know early, we can plan.

Now most of you reading this are not dentists and not use to looking at xrays so below I made an animation to show you what it would look like if this young girl had the two teeth developing properly.  Watch closely and you will see the teeth that should have formed flashing on and off.

Missing adult teeth animation

Should my tooth be sensitive after a filling?

After having a new "filling" the tooth shouldn't be sensitive or uncomfortable.  But there are reasons it might be.  So lets review some reasons why a tooth may be sensitive after a new filling is placed.

First off, I am going to discuss "white" fillings.  These are made of a composite resin, which is a high strength type of plastic.  These fillings need to be bonded to the tooth structure they touch or else oral bacteria and saliva will seep in between the filling and tooth.  Old metal fillings did not need to be bonded because we depended on corrosion to seal the "gap" between tooth and filling (really, that's true!).  But because it takes some time for the metal to start to corrode, we had to put a foul smelling varnish layer on the tooth before we placed the metal filling in to temporarily seal the tooth.

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