What is the Best Treatment for a Missing Tooth?

Missing teeth can make it hard for you to talk or chew food. Moreover, missing teeth harm your smile, ergo your appearance. Specialists at Advantage Dental Care offer general dentistry in Springfield, VA , including solutions for missing teeth. Often if you are missing a tooth or just had a tooth pulled from tooth extraction, you will have four options on what to do next:

1. No replacement

Do you have a missing tooth that is not bothering your cosmetic appearance? Maybe it is super far back in your oral cavity, and you cannot even tell it is missing, or you do not even notice it is gone because you do not have an opposing tooth to chew with. This means you lost a bottom tooth and your top tooth opposing it is also missing; unless you are going to replace both, one option is to do nothing at all. But more often than not, this is not the best option because you will have bone loss in this area over time and the opposing teeth, if there are any, can drop down. Also, molar teeth are functional teeth; they are the ones that help you chew your food. So, always keep function in mind, but know that it is always an option to do nothing at all.

2. A partial denture or a flipper

Again, this option does not keep the bone level where it should be. Therefore you can get bone loss over time. However, it will improve your cosmetic appearance, and it can help if it is a true partial denture. If it is just a flipper, it is for appearance purposes only. Either way, you need to remove it every night when you sleep. But during the day, partials and flippers will fill the gap.

3. Dental bridges

This used to be the best option to replace the missing tooth before implants came along. But now, it is not always the best option because you have to crown both adjacent teeth to the missing tooth. So if something goes wrong in the future with one of those two teeth holding the middle tooth in the bridge, you now lose the whole bridge, all three crowns. Plus, if the two teeth are healthy, you are putting crowns on healthy teeth. Otherwise, they do not need to be disturbed with the drilling and the crowns. Moreover, you can lose bone in that area over time.

4. Dental implants

This option involves a standalone crown that does not place strain on any other teeth. It does not disturb the surrounding teeth, and it helps maintain the bone level. An implant is a screw that goes directly into your bone, and after it heals, you get a crown that screws onto it. The screw itself is called the implant. The tooth portion you can see is called the implant crown, and the abutment is what holds the tooth together.

Currently, implants are considered the best option to replace a missing tooth, but there are situations when your bone is not high enough for the implant to be placed. For this reason, you can get a bone graft where the dentist adds tissue to your bone, sutures it up, and then you are ready for a future implant.

Contact Advantage Dental Care to find out which dental treatment option for missing teeth is best for you.