Whether you’re missing a single tooth or several teeth, the effects extend far past your smile. Your teeth also play crucial roles in your ability to speak and chew, so you want to find replacements that will cover all the bases — and dental implants certainly fit the bill.
As oral health experts, Dr. Mohammed Mansour and the team here at Plano Dental Distinction understand better than most how important your teeth are for your overall health and wellness.
Here, we explain the ways dental implants can preserve your ability to speak and chew with ease.
The perils of not replacing missing teeth
If you lose a tooth, especially one that’s not visible when you smile, you may think that your remaining teeth are more than capable of picking up the slack. Unfortunately, a single missing tooth can emperil your surrounding teeth.
When you lose a tooth, you lose the roots below the gumline, and these roots are critical to the health of your jawbone. When your jawbone registers the inactivity after the roots go missing, it ceases to remodel and rebuild bone in the area.
At first, this only affects the immediate area, but eventually the bone loss affects the surrounding teeth, causing them to loosen and shift. All too soon, your single missing tooth can lead to the loss of more teeth, creating much larger problems in terms of speaking and chewing.
When you have missing teeth, your speech can be affected and you can develop problems pronouncing words. As well, you may have to limit certain foods (think crunchy foods like carrots), which can impact your nutrition.
How dental implants preserve your speech and nutrition
There are many reasons why dental implants are so popular — more than five million are placed each year in the United States — starting with the fact that implants mimic your natural teeth right down to the roots.
With a dental implant, we place a titanium post into your jawbone, and the bone grows and around it to fuse the implant into place. In other words, with an implant, we’re telling your jawbone to continue to actively remodel the bone.
This fusion allows for superior stability of your replacement tooth, which we attach to the post, giving you renewed confidence in your ability to chew and speak.
Restoring entire rows of teeth
While we’ve discussed how missing one, two, or more teeth can affect how you speak and eat, these complications are greatly magnified when you’re missing entire rows of teeth.
Should this occur, dental implants can play a valuable role by creating anchors for dentures or bridges. With dental implants, we can provide the stability that’s so often lacking in dentures, which can be a game-changer when it comes to speech and chewing.
The bottom line is that dental implants are not only great options for restoring that beautiful smile of yours, but they also preserve important functions like chewing and talking.
If you’d like to learn more about dental implants, contact our office in Plano, Texas, to set up an appointment.