Why You Should Always Replace Gaps in Your Mouth

If you have missing teeth, you may feel self-conscious about the gaps in your smile, which can impact on your confidence.

Trapped food, ‘Drifting’ and ‘Over-Eruption’:

If you have one or more missing teeth, you may also start to notice some problems with your oral health. Food can become trapped in the gaps or you may have to change how you bite and chew food to compensate for the missing tooth/teeth. This can start a chain reaction of events that leads to further problems. For example, your teeth on either side of the gap/s can start to move into the space (called ‘drifting’), while opposing teeth in the opposite jaw may also move into the space created (called ‘over-eruption’); drifting and over-eruption can change the way you bite and you can even start to wear teeth down because of how you’re biting. This is a very unstable and unpredictable situation which needs resolving otherwise it can lead to a lot of further unexpected problems in the future.

More Pressure on other teeth and fillings:

In addition, if you have to chew or bite in a different way due to a gap, it can put more pressure on the teeth that remain especially teeth that are already heavily filled or crowned. This in turn can lead to a greater risk of more fillings or other teeth breaking, and so the spiral continues.

Early intervention:

We often see many patients that have got to a desperate situation where they have gradually lost more and more teeth over time simply because they kept breaking them beyond repair, when all they needed was to be educated about the importance of replacing their missing teeth at a much earlier stage.

So, in summary, there are good clinical reasons to always consider replacing missing teeth; having a stable and predictable mouth free of unexpected problems in the future should be the main purpose, as well as being able to smile and chew confidently.

Please click here to book an appointment with our Patient Coordinator or if you wish to speak to us in person about the options to replace gaps.