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Prevent Grinding Or Clenching Teeth With A Mouthguard

Are you grinding your teeth away? You are not alone - Millions of people suffer from early erosion of their teeth due to clenching and grinding. This is mostly occurring during your sleep. A simple fix with a mouthguard/ night guard can totally protect your teeth.

Grinding & Clenching

Mouth Guard

Today we’re going to talk about a mouthguard/ night guard.

There are quite a few common signs and symptoms that you need one. One of the most common causes is clenching or grinding at night.

Sometimes you’ll know when you’re grinding your teeth because someone will tell you. They can hear it, just that sound at night. If no one has ever told you that, it could be that you’re just clenching and you’re not actually making that sound. So, a big way we can tell that is if you have wear on your teeth or flattening. The canine teeth or the back teeth, where they’re supposed to be nice and pointy will be flat.

Another sign are chips in your teeth or fractures, like when you bite down on something and a tooth fractures. That could be it, so if you look at your front or back teeth and start seeing little chips on them. Your fillings can break, part of the cusp can break, that can be a sign of grinding.

If you’re experiencing pain when you’re chewing in certain areas. Once the enamel wears off, the tooth appears more yellow. That’s because of the exposed dentin, which is the most sensitive part of your teeth. So cold air, water, that can cause sensitivity. Aside from your teeth, you may be experiencing jaw pain where it feels tight, lock jaw where you can’t open or close properly. Sometimes, people even complain or pain in their head, neck, and shoulders. A main area that it starts with is the temple in the headaches. Cheek bites could be another thing, if you see open white spots on the inside of your cheeks, that can be the cause of that. So, if you’re experiencing any of these, there could be causes for that like stress, age.

With children it’s common for children to grind their their teeth but usually they grow out of that by the times they reach adulthood.

There are some medical conditions like epilepsy, sleep apnea, ADHD, that also cause you to clench or grind your teeth. So, if you’re experiencing any of these things you can come see us. We’ll make you a night guard, it’s a simple appliance. You wear it every night, it just pops on and you take it out in the morning. It relaxes your muscles so you may not be clenching your teeth but, you can clench onto the night guard, which is perfect. Please don’t ignore the signs of wear on your teeth. If you’re noticing that you have wear on your teeth, it’s only going to continue if you don’t get a night guard. Your teeth will start to shorten over time. You really start to lose that youthful appearance of your teeth. If you’re noticing that and it’s beyond the preventative stage, there are things we can do like crowns. So if you already find that your teeth are really short, that can start causing jaw problems. In those cases we can solve that problem by putting crowns on your teeth to increase the height to where it was before so that you stop having jaw problems.

If you’re noticing any of the things we talked about, don’t hesitate to give us a call, we want to catch it early, and  get you into a nught guard so we can prevent future more serious problems.

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