Effects of Missing Teeth

When teeth are lost, the surrounding bone loses its purpose and thus tends to regress and resorb away.

When teeth are present, the bone serves to hold the teeth in place.

In this respect, your jawbone behaves very similar to muscles. If muscles are used constantly, then they remain strong and present. However, if you stop using any particular muscle, it would slowly waste away. This is called Atrophy.

Similarly, bone requires stimulation from the teeth to continue to remain dense and strong. When teeth are lost, the jawbone surrounding the lost tooth tends to become atrophic, less dense, and so resorbs away, losing its form.

Over time, the jawbone loses its shape and density, becoming very thin and weak. This causes problems of instability and retention with dentures or loss of cosmetics with a bridge forming a gap underneath it. Since the atrophic process occurs very slowly, a person may not realise this is happening until they begin to suffer the consequences, such as a poor fitting or unretentive denture.

Hence, continuous stimulation is required by either teeth or treatment such as dental implants. Scientific studies have proven that the constant chewing forces being applied to teeth are required to preserve the jawbone and keep it strong.

This is one of the main reasons why so much focus has been given to innovative tooth replacement treatments like dental implants.

When teeth are lost, the face can appear more ageing.

Loss of multiple teeth can mean there is no longer any support for the facial muscles and skin.

This can lead to a hollowing of the cheek areas or increased nasolabial folds (nose to lip line). Also, the lower third of the face compared to the middle and upper third can appear disproportionately shorter due to vertical jawbone loss.

These factors can accelerate line and wrinkle formation on the face contributing to diminishing facial aesthetics.

As a direct consequence of missing teeth, the cosmetic appearance of the mouth and the smile can be negatively impacted.

Often when the missing teeth gaps have been left for some time, the subsequent Treatment Plans can be more complex, needing procedures like Gum Grafting to achieve the required aesthetics.  

Tooth loss’s emotional and psychological consequences can be pretty complex and disturbing.

Symptoms can range from minimal effects such as placing the hand over the mouth when talking to various levels of deep anxiety.

Some patients feel they have lost a part of themselves and are no longer “whole” and thus experience the emotional effects of an oral disability.

This worsens over time as they experience symptoms like unstable unretentive dentures due to gradual loss of bone.

Alternatively, people can suffer from the psychological impact of social embarrassment with either missing teeth or having to wear unretentive dentures. 

Patients who have lost teeth or wear dentures may impact their general lives, reducing the quality of their lifestyle.

Experiencing things such as a continuous bad taste from food trapping underneath poor-fitting dentures where the fit may have changed over time; inconsistent denture fit; constantly having to reapply denture fixative; unable to chew correctly with no or unstable dentures, and the consequences of a decreased performance over time of the other teeth and dentures.

These things can inhibit the quality of life, making it a noticeable lifestyle disability. 

When teeth are taken out, the neighbouring teeth may move into the space created by the lost tooth.

This can result in tilting and rotating other teeth into the space, which has many knock-on effects on the rest of the mouth. There are many adverse effects on the bite functioning as a direct consequence of losing teeth.

These include:

• Bite discrepancies. When teeth are not aligned and upright as they should be, their biting surfaces are also tilted incorrectly. This means that the once-upon-a-time stable and harmonious bite no longer exists, and teeth will be misused. These causes wear facets to form, further disrupting the bite patterns. The bite, as a result, becomes unbalanced. This can lead to fractures and breaking of fillings and teeth.
• Excess tooth wear. When teeth are lost, the remaining teeth tend to take the brunt of the biting forces and, over time, will wear faster. This is especially true when the back teeth are lost; it is common to see highly worn incisors (front teeth).
• The aesthetics of the smile will deteriorate. Tooth movement can lead to discrepancies such as crowding to develop or spacing to open up between teeth. This begins to impact the smile and aesthetics over time negatively.
• Gum disease. As the other teeth move, the likelihood for plaque and tartar to build-up increases. This is because it becomes increasingly more difficult to clean the teeth due to the extra nooks and crannies developing around the mouth that only worsen. This causes gum disease or decay to develop.
• They have complicated future treatments. When the other teeth in the mouth move, future treatments increasingly become more complex and costlier. This is because the loss of teeth affects not only the remaining teeth in both movement and infection but also the gums are impacted by developing gum disease. This leads to more complex Treatment Plans.
• Losing your front teeth can affect the pronunciation of your words and thus affect your speech. Front incisor teeth, together with the lips, are needed to make certain sounds such as “F”, “V”, and “S”.
• Chewing Performance. One of the most critical functions of teeth is to break down and chew your food into small pieces before the rest of your digestive system takes over. Without good teeth functioning and bite dynamics, this may not occur—this cause you to make different food choices and adjustments to the foods you would typically enjoy eating. Also, you may experience nutritional deficiencies since your body might not be able to absorb the proper nutrients from the foods you cannot break down. The jawbone, jaw joints, teeth and the central nervous system all work together in a delicate, harmonious balance, continuously feeding off the sensory nerve receptors in each part. When teeth are lost, the information translated into the neurosensory system dramatically reduces the maximum bite forces. This sets in the inefficiency of chewing patterns.

• Comfort. When teeth are gradually lost, you will generally tend to be more uncomfortable in your mouth due to the above consequences.