The silent killer of teeth is bruxism or teeth grinding. For most people, this happens at night while they’re sleeping. However, oftentimes the spouse or sleeping partner will hear the annoying noise of tooth against tooth wearing away.
Tooth enamel is the hardest thing in the human body, and yet it is not indestructible. After years of attrition, or wearing down their teeth, the grinding patient eventually grinds completely through the white enamel and into the more yellow root dentin under it. Unfortunately, the root dentin is only about 25% as hard as the enamel, and thus the rate of wearing away of the tooth drastically speeds up once the enamel covering had worn a hole through it exposing the root dentin. When you look down at a tooth that had been worn through the enamel it will be clearly obvious as there will be two layers, an outside ring of whiter enamel and a center portion of yellow root dentin. This is where you need Steel Bite pro, a modern and completely safe method through which you can easily control tooth grinding. These Steel Bite Pro Reviews will tell you all about the treatment process that you need to know.
But it doesn’t end here. The damage to the teeth continues over the years. When several millimeters of teeth have worn away the teeth then start wearing into a third area of the tooth called the secondary or reparative root dentin. This area is again a circular area in the center of the visible top of the tooth, but this third area is darker yellow or brown. The giveaway that this point has been reached is that there are now three visible layers and the tooth will have the appearance of a bull’s eye with three concentric rings.
If you could go back in time, this secondary root dentin is the area that once was occupied by the tooth nerve and pulp in a younger, healthy tooth. However, due to aging and trauma, the tooth nerve recedes away from the impinging trauma, and in attempts to protect or heal itself, the tooth puts up a layer of the internal tooth. It is this protective layer that is the center of the “bull’s eye”. Usually, this means the tooth has lost at least 30-50% of the original tooth that first appeared above the gum line (dentists call this the “clinical crown”) when the patient was a youngster.
One can easily understand that the tooth will continue to wear down until there is very little tooth there and oftentimes dental patients wait too long before they finally decide to go back to their dentist and to do something about it, and then it’s too late. If the tooth can’t be saved or crowned, then a denture, bridge, or implant might be the only treatment left.
Fortunately for most patients who go to the dentist, the damaging effects of bruxism can be detected early enough to treat. Almost always the most preventive approach is to make a dental appliance to be worn over the teeth while the patient sleeps. It’s called a “night guard” or “bruxism appliance.” This slows down the process, but for most people, bruxism cannot be stopped, and thus these appliances only slow down the process and don’t cure it. There are many instances where the dentist will determine that placing a protective crown on several teeth is necessary to preserve what is there and prevent further loss of tooth enamel and dentin. Dental crowns seldom wear down, and if they do it is only the fraction of the wear that would occur if the tooth hadn’t received a protective crown.
