6 Of The Most Common Dental Problems, Fixed!

Smile! There’s good news from the world of dentistry: Older American are keeping their teeth longer than ever before and the average number of teeth people retain into old age is increasing, says Judith Ann Jones, DDS, a spokesman on elder care for the American Dental Association and director of The Center for Clinical Research at the Boston University Goldman School of Dental Medicine.
But Jones is not all smiles. As people keep their teeth longer, there are more problems that are likely to arise, which is why keeping up with regular dental visits is so important. Here are the most common problems, and what you can do about them:

Tooth Decay

Yes, people over 50 can get cavities. You can get them on the surfaces of teeth that have never been a problem before, but you can also get them around old fillings or at the root of your tooth. “As you age, the root of your tooth becomes softer and sometimes more exposed,” Jones explains.
The Fix: Fluoride is not just for kids, Jones says. “Fluoride is one of the 10 most important health measures developed in the 20th century.” Almost 80 percent of people in the United States have fluorinated water, but if you don’t, you should probably add a daily fluoride rinse to your brushing habit. Or ask your doctor about a stronger fluoride prescription gel. If you are starting to get cavities, even if your water has fluoride, consider a fluoride rinse. Ask your dentist if that’s right for you.

Dry Mouth

Saliva protects us against tooth decay. But if you’re not producing it, your teeth may be at risk. The calcium and phosphate present in saliva prevent demineralization of your teeth, Jones says. How do you know if you have dry mouth? You’ll have a sticky feeling in your mouth, trouble swallowing, dry throat, and dry, cracked lips. You may notice a metallic taste in your mouth or persistent bad breath. You may or may not feel thirsty. Dry mouth is often caused by medications, and as people age, they take more medications. It can also result from smoking or from a blow to the head that somehow damages the salivary glands.
The Fix: If you have dry mouth, you should try to stimulate saliva production. Jones says some people just sip water all day while others find that chewing sugar-free xylitol candies or gum helps. Your dentist may prescribe a prescription saliva substitute or recommend over-the-counter formulations for you to try.

Gum Disease

If your gums are swollen, red, or bleed easily, you’ve got gingivitis, an early form of gum disease that can progress and be dangerous. Untreated gingivitis often becomes periodontitis, which is when the gum pulls away from the tooth and creates pockets which can become infected. If this condition develops and continues unchecked, it could cause the loss of bones in your jaw and eventually, the loss of the teeth themselves.
The Fix: The best fix for this condition is regular dentist visits, Jones says. You may need to visit your dentist more frequently so that your teeth can be cleaned and your gums treated for the condition. People who don’t have good access to dental care are more likely to have gum disease, Jones says.

Oral Cancer

More than 43,000 Americans will be diagnosed with oral cancers this year, and more than 8,000 will die from it, according to The Oral Cancer Foundation. Oral cancer incidence definitely increases as you get older, Jones says, and is very often linked to smoking and heavy alcohol use. Recently, the number of cases has risen because doctors have discovered that the Human Papilloma Virus also can cause oral cancer.
The Fix: Only about half of people who develop oral cancer survive the disease, Jones says. The best hope for survival is to discover it at its earliest stages—in which case there is an 80 percent chance of surviving for five years. Your dental exam should include a check for oral cancer. Your dentist will hold your tongue and check the soft tissue in your mouth as well as your throat and jaw. If he or she does not, find another dentist, Jones says.

Tooth Crowding

Are you noticing that food is getting stuck in new places in your mouth? Or that the overlapping tooth that was cute in your teens now seems to be overlapping even more? You’re not imagining it. As you age, your teeth shift, according to Lee W. Graber, D.D.S., M.S., M.S., Ph.D., Past President of the American Association of Orthodontists. And that can be problematic, not because you’ll look different, but because it can make your teeth more difficult to clean, leading to more decay. It’s also of concern because misaligned teeth can lead to teeth erosion and damage to the supporting tissue and bone, Graber says. Add to that the tendency of older adults to have periodontal disease, and you could end up losing your teeth even faster.
The Fix: If your teeth have really shifted, you could see an orthodontist, who may fit you with a retainer, spacer, or even braces. This may not be necessary, but you should discuss with your dentist whether your teeth are shifting at your regular check up. If they are, it may mean only that you need to go to the dentist more regularly for more frequent cleanings.

Grinding and Clenching

This is not a habit that begins late in life, but it’s one whose effects might be most pronounced as you age. If you tend to grind your teeth or to clench them in your sleep, you may grind through the enamel to the dentin, which can cause pain and decay. Also, if you have crowns or bridges in your mouth, they may be damaged by such habits.
The Fix: Your dentist can give you a night guard, a small mouth piece that will protect your teeth while you sleep—and protect your investment in the dentistry that’s already there, Jones says.

By: Andrea  Atkins, The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/6-of-the-most-common-dental-problems-fixed_us_58346501e4b099512f84b510

If you have questions or would like to schedule an appointment, please contact Omni Dental Group at one of our three office locations listed below:

North Austin on Hymeadow Drive: (512) 250-5012
Central Austin on Jollyville Road: (512) 346-8424
South Austin on William Cannon: (512) 445-5811

Dental Detectives: What Fossil Teeth Reveal About Ancestral Human Diets

When scientists want to know what our ancient ancestors ate, they can look at a few things: fossilized animal bones with marks from tools used to butcher and cut them; fossilized poop; and teeth. The first two can tell us a lot, but they're hard to come by in the fossil record. Thankfully, there are a lot of teeth to fill in the gaps.
"They preserve really well," explains Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, a dental anthropologist at Ohio State University. "It's kind of convenient because teeth hold so much information."
The structure of a tooth and even the amount of enamel, for example, hint at what the teeth are adapted to eat.
Look at molars: Thick enamel on a molar is good for crushing foods. It suggests an animal used its teeth to grind seeds or crush the marrow out of bones. Thin enamel on a molar, while delicate, causes sharp edges — perfect for slicing and tearing foods like leaves and fruits.
However, these are just clues to some of the things the animal could have been eating, not what it ate every day, says Peter Ungar, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas.

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"If you eat Jell-O almost every day of the year, but sometimes you need to eat rocks ... you want teeth that can eat rocks," he explains. So, teeth are usually adapted for the toughest component of an animal's diet, not what it eats on a daily basis.
To see what an animal was actually eating, Ungar studies something called dental microwear, the marks left behind by food on teeth. As we chew on say, a celery stick, hard particles — either bits of silica from the plants' cells or sand and grit from the surrounding environment — are dragged across and pressed into our teeth. When we chomp down on something hard, like a nut, the crushing force leaves microscopic pits behind. When we tear through tough grasses — which may not sound appetizing now, but it's likely some of our ancestors did eat them — by moving our teeth side-to-side, the teeth get tiny, microscopic scratches.
"I call it a foodprint," Ungar says.
These foodprints can paint a pretty good picture of what an animal ate in the weeks leading up to its death — a sort of last meal. A study of such microwear revealed that Australopithecus afarensis, our 4 million-year-old ancestor best known by the famous fossil of Lucy, probably ate tough grasses and leaves. And it looks like early members of our genus, Homo — like Homo habilis, which lived 2.4 million years ago or Homo erectus, which even overlapped with humans about 100,000 years ago — were omnivores like us. They ate a variety of foods like meat, plants, fruits, "Anything they wanted!" says Ungar.
So we can tell what an animal was adapted to eat and what it ate shortly before it died. But to know what it ate for longer periods, scientists have to look deeper — to just below the surface of a tooth — for certain molecular signatures left behind from daily meals.
As our teeth grow in early childhood and adolescence, they incorporate certain molecules from the food we eat. The same was true for our ancestors. Paleoanthropologists studying ancient diets are especially interested in carbon molecules in our ancestors' teeth, because they come from plants and stick around for a long time.
Some groups of plants use mostly one form, or isotope, of carbon. Plants with C3 isotopes are usually found in fruits and leaves — things that grow in forests. Plants with C4 isotopes, like grasses and sedges, grow in savannas.
Data from isotopes confirmed that Lucy's species switched from forest foods to savanna foods about 3.5 million years ago. That transition from forests to grasslands may have played a key role in human evolution, explains Matt Sponheimer, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Some researchers even think that adding more grass to our diets gave our ancestors more foods to eat and places to live as the early climate changed causing Africa's forests to shrink.
Our understanding of what our ancestors ate has become more complex and richer with time, as scientists have applied newer, more advanced techniques to study teeth. When Mary Leakey dug the 2 million-year-old human ancestor Paranthropus boisei out of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania in 1959 year, she noticed the fossil's wide, thick molars. The skull had huge cheekbones to accommodate strong chewing muscles and powerful jaws, suggesting the species was well-suited for crushing nuts. So, Paranthropus boisei was nicknamed Nutcracker Man.
But when Peter Ungar and others examined Nutcracker Man's teeth, they barely found any foodprints, so they decided he likely ate soft foods like fruits.

An analysis of Nutcracker Man's tooth isotopes revealed C4 carbon, which comes from savannas, not fruit-filled forests.
Today, researchers think that Paranthropus boisei ate a varied diet with lots of different foods, but he mostly ate tough grasses and sedges.

Teeth from more recent fossils reveal more because they have more isotopes preserved in them. For example, the nitrogen in the teeth of Neanderthals can reveal whether the protein they ate came from plants or animals. It's one of many reasons researchers think Neanderthals hunted large mammals, though scientists have also found fossilized plants stuck in Neanderthal teeth.
Researchers were even able to use isotopes to find out when one Neanderthal started weaning her baby. As teeth grow, they lay down layers of enamel. And barium, a molecule children get from breast feeding mothers, builds up in baby teeth until the mother stops nursing. By comparing barium in a Neanderthal tooth with levels in donated present day baby teeth, the scientists were able to find out that the Neanderthal baby had been weaned at about seven months.
We can even use teeth to tell if someone moved between places with dramatically different foods or soils. Since wisdom teeth are the last adult teeth to come in, comparing them to an early emerging canine tooth can give scientists a dietary snapshot across time. Say someone was born in Africa and moved to a new continent as a preteen, while wisdom teeth were still growing. A comparison of the isotopes in the teeth would reveal the story of that migration.
There's still a lot to learn from teeth, and a lot of fossil teeth still being discovered, says Sponheimer. And as the tools to study them get more sophisticated, teeth are providing a richer picture of "who we are and how we came to be," he says.

By: Erin Ross, NPR
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/10/25/497094756/dental-detectives-what-fossil-teeth-reveal-about-ancestral-human-diets

If you have questions or would like to schedule an appointment, please contact Omni Dental Group at one of our three office locations listed below:

North Austin on Hymeadow Drive: (512) 250-5012
Central Austin on Jollyville Road: (512) 346-8424
South Austin on William Cannon: (512) 445-5811

A World Record Case!

A team led by Dr. Vandana Thorawade at Sir J.J. Hospital in Mumbai, India spent 7 hours removing 232 teeth from 17-year-old's Ashik Gavai's molars. Doctors were stunned to find a world record of 232 teeth inside his mouth.

What was it?

A series of tests revealed there was an abnormal growth on the second molar on his lower right jaw. The 232 "teeth" varied in sizes - some were very tiny and some were the size of a large marble.  

It has been diagnosed as Complex Composite Odontoma, or a benign tumor of the tooth. The tumor fosters a slow-growth tumor inside the jaw capable of birthing additional teeth-like structures. This can cause some difficulties eating, swallowing, and can lead to a swelling on the patient's face. Dr. Sunanda Dhiware-Palwanker, the head of the hospital's dental department, stated that it most likely began its formation in Ashik's younger age, probably in his post-baby teeth years.

Are the structures really teeth?

According to a study in the International Journal of Clinical Pediatric Dentistry, the condition of composite odontoma is characterized by an "eruption of the teeth." During the tumor's development, "enamel and dentin can be deposited in such a way that the resulting structures show an anatomic similarity to normal teeth." 

Whether they should be called teeth or teeth-like structures are still to be determined.

The controversy

Some claim the condition is rare, while others claim that the structures were "wrongly" called teeth. A normal adult mouth cannot hold more than 34 teeth.

Doctors say they have never known a tumor to produce this many teeth. According to medical literature available on the condition, it is known to affect the upper jaw and a maximum of 37 teeth have been extracted from the tumor in the past. In Ashik's case, the tumor was found in the lower jaw, and it had hundreds of teeth.  

Dr. Sunanda Dhiware-Palwanker stated that Ashik will lead an absolutely normal and healthy life after the ejection of so many teeth. Following the procedure, he now has 28 teeth.

Here is another study published on the condition of Complex Composite Odontoma - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3697136/