Five Surprising Facts about Cavities

Cavities are a kind of tooth decay which by itself is a scary term. Tooth decay makes images of yellowing or crooked teeth that everyone considers ignoring because we think the matter is inconsequential. Unfortunately, tooth decay has adverse effects on your dental and general health.

The National Institute of dental and craniofacial research confirms 26 percent of adults between 20 and 64 have untreated tooth decay in their mouths in various degrees of severity. When left untreated, tooth decay spreads, causing a more severe problem than a hole in the tooth needing a filling.

Age Limits for Cavities Don’t Exist

Cavities begin forming in your as early as when the first tooth erupts or the last. Infants developing their baby teeth at around six months or age one must receive dental exams and cleanings to ensure from a dentist no later than a year after their birth. Dental offices will keep an eye on the child’s tooth development and help educate parents on caring for their teeth as they grow.

Alternatively, mature adults also notice increasing cavities in their teeth. Cavities result from medications, xerostomia, or dry mouth, creating the lack of saliva that protects it from bad bacteria.

Sugar Undoubtedly Damages Your Teeth

Acid production in the mouth is often a result of sugar and carbohydrates remaining on your teeth from improper brushing and flossing and neglecting six-monthly dental visits to the dentist in Longmont for exams and cleanings. The acids cause enamel erosion by wearing down your teeth and their resistance to holes developing in them. Unfortunately, carbohydrates are present in everything except protein, making it essential to care for your teeth after eating.

Prevention Your Best Defense Against Cavities

After you develop cavities, the dentist in Longmont can stop the decay by patching the tooth. However, tooth decay causes permanent damage and is irreversible. Maintaining excellent oral hygiene is the optimal preventive measure against cavities, making it essential for you to have a good oral hygiene regimen.

Brushing and flossing, besides using an antiseptic mouth rinse, helps ensure you clean the harmful microorganisms off your teeth as best as possible. However, you must also include visits to the Longmont family dental at six monthly intervals to enable the dentist to clean challenging reach areas in your mouth that often harbor food particles and bacteria and provide information on how you must change your brushing and flossing routine to benefit your dental health.

Cavities don’t just develop on your tooth surfaces but also from between your teeth remaining invisible to the naked eye. The Longmont takes x-rays of your teeth to identify signs of cavities between them that have aggravated or are just forming to determine a course of action to best deal with the hole by filling it and helping reverse damage from micro-cavities by providing fluoride treatments.

Telling When You Have a Cavity Is Challenging

If you avoid dental visits thinking you don’t have cavities in your teeth and delay dental checkups, you allow your mouth bacteria to create severe damage in the tooth than if detected early. Dentists receive extensive training and routinely look for signs of tooth decay in the mouth. They can examine every surface of your tooth using state-of-the-art technology instead of merely visualizing them.

Dental experts and the ADA suggest visiting your dentist once every six months or at intervals recommended by them for a comprehensive cleaning to ensure nothing harmful exists in your mouth that needs fixing.

Although tooth decay is scary, it is largely preventable. All you need to incorporate in your life is an excellent dental hygiene regimen: brushing twice daily, flossing once, and visiting dentists every six months for exams and cleanings. In addition, if you develop holes in your teeth despite the best efforts getting the tooth patched immediately upon receiving information from the dentist can help prevent significant problems.

Untreated tooth decay doesn’t remain dormant in your teeth but continues expanding until it reaches the center of your tooth, housing the dental pulp, nerves, blood vessels, and connective tissue. Do you know what happens when you develop a severe infection affecting the dental pulp? You become vulnerable to the highly disliked root canal treatment to save your tooth from extraction, which you could have avoided by getting tooth fillings by getting your teeth examined every six months.

Fox Creek Dental by Espire Longmont suggests everyone, including children, maintain excellent dental hygiene and get regular dental cleanings to prevent cavities on their teeth. If you are overdue for your dental checkup, kindly schedule a meeting with this facility to get your teeth cleaned today.