When teeth are lost...

When a tooth is lost and it is less visible because it was in the back of the mouth, a reaction I often get from patients is, OK, I can live with one less tooth.  I can still chew effectively.  But is that all that really happens?  Does everything else in your mouth stay thelosing back teeth has consequences! same?  Unfortunately nature is not so kind.  There are always consequences and they are subtle and develop over time.  As you can see in the animation I made here the teeth do in fact move. 

Nearby teeth will tip into the space where the missing teeth were.   Spaces develop between the adjacenty teeth and as they move into the new available space...allowing food, plaque and tartar ( what we dentists call "calculus") to accumulate around these teeth and under the gums.  Of course this promote periodontal or gum disease. You can see here that spaces can even develp between the tooth and gums as a tooth tips over.

As the teeth become misaligned, their inappropriate new positions can affect the way the upper and lower teeth fit together and can result in muscle or jaw pain.   This is because the chewing muscles have to learn new unnatural movements to avoid inappropriate contact of the misaligned teeth.

Losing posterior teeth of course leaves fewer teeth for you to chew with.  The remaining teeth have to take on more load or pressure to compensate.  Some of the remaining teeth having tipped take on this added chewing pressure at an odd angle, causing stress on the teeth in a direction they were not designed by nature to support.  Posterior teeth- molars- are large and designed to take the heaviest chewing pressure and have multiple roots to help with that job.  As molars are lost, chewing forces are shifted to the anterior teeth that are smaller and have only one root.

Losing posterior teeth starts a domino effect that slowly causes problems that can easily be prevented, but once they occur, can be difficult and costly to remedy.

So what to do if you lose a posterior tooth?   Implants or fixed Bridges are two common remedies.  More on those solutions in another post.