A Missing Tooth In Your Dentures: Surely It's Not An Urgent Problem?
Losing a tooth is an exciting time—for children. For adults, it's a little scary. After all, a lost permanent tooth indicates severe gum disease or may be due to a serious accident. But what about when your lost tooth wasn't attached to your gums? When a tooth detaches from your dentures, it's neither exciting nor scary. If anything, it's a bit annoying. Luckily, this annoyance is easy to fix—although it's important to do it properly.
Retain the Tooth (If You Can)
A lost prosthetic tooth in a denture base plate is not a complicated problem, although it has the potential to affect your oral health without prompt attention. Please keep the tooth if you're able to because it can help the denture specialists at your nearest repair clinic. If it's structurally sound, the tooth can generally be reattached to its base plate. This is generally the quickest form of repair and is less expensive than having a new tooth manufactured. Naturally, if the tooth was accidentally swallowed, it's lost forever. But if it's as simple as reattaching the tooth, can you do that at home?
Repairs at Home
There are a number of denture repair kits available for purchase, or you may even intend to use super glue. This is extremely unwise. The strength of the bond will be severely lacking when compared to professional denture repairs. This increases the risk of the tooth detaching once again, which in turn increases your risk of swallowing (and losing) the tooth. The position of the tooth may also have been altered during amateur reattachment, causing excess friction with other teeth in your denture base, which has the potential to destabilize them. Additionally, the glue or bonding material you use at home will also be highly toxic. Professional repairs are not only recommended but are mandatory.
A Single Unit
Your dentures represent a tremendous amount of dental engineering. Despite being composed of multiple parts (individual prosthetic teeth attached to a base plate), your dentures are intended to work as a single unit. A missing tooth weakens that unit, so going without repairs isn't an option. Dentures absorb the occlusal force (bite pressure) as a single unit, and a missing piece of that unit increases the stress on the unit. Going without a tooth in your dentures means that the base plate and other teeth may deteriorate and break, making repairs impossible—necessitating an entirely new set of dentures.
Having a missing tooth reattached to your denture base plate is a quick and simple job, and shouldn't be too expensive. It's also more important than you might first have thought.
Contact a local denture specialist to learn more.
Share