Preventive dentistry, like your dental checkup and cleaning appointments, help you prevent issues that could lead to damage or infection in your teeth or oral tissues. Cosmetic dentistry improves your smile’s appearance, and restorative dentistry helps fix broken or infected teeth to prevent their loss. However, if one or more teeth are lost, then you will need a dental prosthesis to replace them, and today, prosthetic dentistry offers a wide variety of options to do so.
About Tooth Loss and Replacement
You might think that replacing lost teeth would be a cosmetic issue, since the gap in your smile most noticeably affects its appearance. Yet, given the intricate nature of your teeth and how they interact with your oral structures, replacing lost teeth requires more complex diagnosis and treatment planning. For your dental prosthetic (i.e., dental bridge or denture) to work properly, it must function as well as your healthy, natural teeth would.
Modern Dental Prosthetics
Dental prosthetics typically include dental bridges, partial dentures, and complete dentures, depending on the severity of a patient’s tooth loss. If you’ve lost a single tooth, or if the few teeth that you’ve lost are in a row, then a dental bridge can span the gap with replacement teeth to rebuild your smile. If you’ve lost a significant amount of teeth, or all of them, then we may recommend a partial denture or complete denture (for total tooth loss) to reestablish your bite’s ability to function.
With Dental Implants
As a relatively new addition to prosthetic dentistry, dental implants are also the most comprehensive solution to replacing lost teeth. The small, titanium posts are implanted into your jawbone, acting as roots upon which we can place your dental prosthetic. A single implant and crown can replace a single lost tooth, or one or a series of implants can support a larger bridge or denture.
ABOUT YOUR SHREWSBURY DENTISTS:
At Modern Dentistry, Todd A. Pizzi, DDS, and Luciana Messina, DDS, are dedicated to providing high-quality cosmetic, restorative, and preventive dentistry services to patients and families in Shrewsbury, Worcester, North and South Grafton, Westborough, Southborough, Northborough, Boylston, Hopkinton, Millbury, and all surrounding communities. To schedule your next appointment, contact our office by calling (508) 842-6356 today.
