It’s uncommon to find someone who doesn’t have a single filling in their mouth. These dental treatments are our No. 1 tool against tooth decay, and they play a large role in helping to preserve your teeth.
At Plano Dental Distinction, Dr. Mohammed Mansour and our team offer comprehensive dental filling services, and there are two types to choose from — silver and composite. In this month’s blog post, we’re focusing on composite fillings, which offer several advantages, three of which we review here.
1. The power of dental fillings
Whether you opt for composite or silver, we want to underscore the importance of dental fillings in your overall oral health. When tooth decay attacks your mouth, it eats away at your teeth, creating dental caries, which is the official name for cavities. Left unchecked,a cavity can grow in size and eventually threaten your entire tooth.
Wth dental fillings, we stop the decay in its tracks and fill in the cavity to preserve the strength of your tooth.
To give you an idea of the extent of the problem, more than one in four adults in the United States is living with untreated tooth decay, which can be easily resolved with a simple dental filling.
2. The ultimate cover-up
The main advantage of composite fillings over silver fillings is that they’re tooth-colored. Silver fillings, as the name implies, come with a silver color that is easily visible to the eye against the white enamel.
Composite fillings are made from composite resin materials that match the color of your natural tooth, so that your dental work isn’t as obvious. This advantage may not matter so much when it comes to molars located far back in your mouth, but if any of the cavities are located in teeth that can be seen when you smile or talk, composite fillings make great cosmetic sense.
3. A strong solution
The composite resin that we use is quite strong and able to stand up to the rigors of chewing. As well, when we use composite fillings, we don’t need to drill into your tooth as much as we would with a silver filling since the composite materials bond more readily to your existing tooth. This means that more of your tooth’s natural structure remains intact.
When it comes to longevity of a composite filling, it’s impossible to say here, as it depends upon a number of factors, including:
- The size of the filling
- The workload of the filling
- Your daily dental care
If you take good care of the filling, it should last for many years and, should it become damaged or come out, we can simply replug the cavity with another composite filling.
If you’d like to learn more about composite fillings, please contact us today to make an appointment at our office in Plano, Texas.