Dental Implants: Health Effects of Missing Teeth

When you lose a tooth, it damages more than just your smile.

Missing teeth force you to alter your lifestyle to accommodate the change in your mouth. Our Ann Arbor dentists at New Era Dental knows that a healthy mouth depends on a full set of teeth — not just for chewing, but for maintaining healthy gums and strengthening your jawbone.

How Dental Implants Help

As soon as you replace a missing tooth, you improve the overall health of your mouth. The space left by a missing tooth negatively affects your nutrition, the surrounding teeth, and your jawbone. Replacing a missing tooth with a dental implant benefits the look and function of your mouth and contributes to your overall oral health.

Missing teeth make eating the foods we love difficult and even painful. If you limit your diet to only what your teeth can handle, you miss out on many important nutrients — leading to poor nutrition.

Each tooth in your mouth provides support for the teeth around it —when one is missing, the ones surrounding it having nothing to lean on. As soon as teeth feel an opening near them, they loosen up, shift and tilt inwards to fill the space. This often leads to tooth decay and even further tooth loss.

When your jawbone feels the absence of a tooth, it responds by deteriorating. The pressure our jaws receive from tooth roots stimulates bone cells. Without that pressure, the gap left by missing teeth continues to deteriorate until something replaces it. Dental solutions to missing teeth become troublesome the more the jaw deteriorates. In some cases, jawbone loss leads to jaw shrinkage and facial collapse.

Whether you need just one, or all, of your teeth, replaced, dental implants provide a solution for your mouth that will last a lifetime. With dental implants, you can eat the foods you love without worrying about pain and discomfort. Moreover, by inserting titanium roots into the hollow gaps where your teeth are missing, dental implants prevent your natural teeth from shifting and your jawbone from deteriorating.

To learn more about Ann Arbor family dentists at New Era Dental and the dental services we offer, please contact us here or call us at 734-339-2131. The dental team New Era Dental strives to be the very best at providing patients with optimal dental care while making them feel right at home here in Ann Arbor, MI.