Periodontal disease could lead to major impacts on your smile. Without treatment to manage it, you risk major long-term issues, including discomfort and even tooth loss! In today’s blog, your team at Brooklyn Periodontics and Implantology talks about how we treat and manage gum disease, and the risks to your oral health that untreated periodontal disease can cause! We want to take action to ensure you continue to enjoy a full and beautiful smile.
The Onset Of Periodontal Disease
Various factors could cause your gums to become inflamed. When this happens, you could experience soreness and redness. As the inflammatory, known as gingivitis, progresses into periodontal disease, you could notice bleeding and even recession that makes teeth appear long. Potential causes include inflammatory illnesses like diabetes, a family history of poor gum health, tobacco use, and factors that cause plaque and tartar buildup, like poor brushing and flossing habits and a diet high in sugar and starch.
The Symptoms
We mentioned a few common symptoms above, such as redness in the tissues or if they feel sore. You could also have bleeding when you brush and floss, and you could notice recession, as gums pull back from the teeth. The teeth then appear longer, and the risk of periodontitis, the stage linked to tooth loss, increases. Don’t ignore these changes to your gums, even if they appear minor. Talk to our team right away for a diagnosis and to discuss possible treatment options to preserve your smile.
The Risk of Tooth Loss and Weakened Jawbone Structure
The most common cause of adult tooth loss is actually periodontal disease. The periodontitis stage actually severs the tissues connecting your teeth and gums, which leads to loose and missing teeth. Once you lose teeth, this could cause the jawbone around the missing rots to break down and erode, a complication linked to further tooth loss and eventually, an aged appearance. This weakened jawbone could even prevent you from enjoying dental implant placement to address your missing teeth! But we can help prevent these complications with periodontic treatment.
Help With Periodontic Treatment
Our team will conduct a diagnosis with digital imaging technology, which enables us to assess the severity of the disease, and also any damage to connective tissues and the underlying jawbone structure. From there, we can plan treatment. For a more minor case, we could offer a scaling and root planing to remove harmful buildup for the teeth and roots. Our team will polish the teeth to help make it more difficult for plaque and tartar to cling to the teeth and accumulate before we see you again. We then follow this with a traditional cleaning every three to four months to control harmful buildup and keep the issue under control.
For more severe cases, we could employ advanced dental laser systems to gently trim away the diseased portions of the gums and reshape the gumline. In the process, this also helps destroy harmful oral bacteria, further protecting your smile. Again, we will manage the disease afterward with routine actions every few months, such as cleanings, antimicrobial medications, and even Oxygen Therapy.
Tooth Replacement with Implant Dentistry
How do we address your missing teeth? Once we bring your periodontal disease under control, we can look at your smile. If you have lost too much jawbone structure to support dental implants, we could conduct supportive services, such as jawbone grafting for the lower jaw and a sinus lift for the upper one, to help strengthen your bite and offer a more attractive smile! We then guide dental implants into place, which will act as new teeth and last for years to come, and also help keep your jawbone intact, so you can enjoy your favorite foods again and speak with confidence. No worries about slippage, removing teeth for cleaning or soaking, or about replacing them every five years.
If you have any questions about how we diagnose and treat issues like gum disease to keep your smile whole, or about how we take on your tooth loss with dental implants, then reach out to our team today to learn more and get started. You deserve a full and beautiful smile, and with implant dentistry and periodontic care we can make this possible!
Brooklyn Periodontics Offers Improved Oral Health
We want to help take on periodontal disease to help you avoid the complications we have discussed in our latest blog! For more details about our approach to periodontic care, then please call Brooklyn Periodontics & Implantology in Brooklyn, NY at (718) 444-3800 today.
