Your Teeth and Jaw – An Important Relationship

What you don’t know about your teeth and jaw may surprise you – and make you think twice about resigning yourself to dentures as if it were an ‘easy’ solution to your dental woes. In reality, your teeth are an important part of your jaw’s structural health, and they should be retained if possible.

Your teeth are as alive as the tissues around them, though they appear to be static and unresponsive. Your teeth have blood flowing to them and away from them and they have a direct impact on the shape and profile of your lower face. This is because your teeth are keeping your jaw strong and healthy with each bite your take!

When you take a bite of food, the pressure of the teeth against each other not only breaks down your food effectively, but the pressure sends signals down the shaft of each tooth and into the bone socket that it is housed in. This pressure signals to the bone tissues that this area of the body needs constant reinforcement to support your ability to eat comfortably and effectively. So, the body responds by diverting necessary minerals to the bone surrounding the tooth to keep it resilient to the effects of chewing.

When your teeth are lost or removed, the bones stop receiving direct communication. In as little as 6 months after removal, your bones begin to divert necessary minerals and nutrients away from the jawbone and toward other structures of the body that can make use of this important resource. The result is a jawbone that begins to degrade in a process called bone resorption.

Until recently, dentistry didn’t have a good solution to this pervasive problem among denture wearers. This meant that a denture wearer would often find that their dentures struggled to fit their changing mouth, and required numerous fittings and shape changes over time, that is, until an important discovery was made about titanium.