What Causes Dental Trauma and How to Resolve It
Dental trauma happens during bicycle accidents, sports injuries, falls, and more. The trauma varies from lip lacerations to tooth cracks or jawbone fractures. Dental trauma treatment aims to save the patient’s tooth.
What is Dental Trauma?
This is a physical injury to your gums, teeth, and the soft tissue of your mouth that includes the tongue and lips, and the alveolar bone. This bone holds your tooth socket.
Several types of injuries are categorized as dental trauma, including:
- Jaw fracture
- Chipped teeth
- Lacerations of the gums
- Having tools jammed into sockets, also known as intrusion
- Subluxation is where your tooth is knocked loose
- Tooth fractures, including enamel fractures and root fractures
- Lacerations of their lips
- An avulsion is where your tooth is knocked out
Conditions Responsible for Dental Trauma
In most cases, oral traumas are caused by accidents, including playing sports vehicle collisions and falls. Other causes of dental trauma include involvement in violent incidents such as physical abuse and fighting.
How Dental Trauma is Treated
The treatment of dental trauma depends on its nature. A pediatric dentist near you examines injuries to your teeth and mouth, especially when the tooth has sustained damage and is loose. When you have a tooth severely damaged, its neighboring tooth might also have some injuries that can only be detected through a dental exam.
For Fractured or Chipped Tooth
A pediatric dentist in Scarsdale, NY, recommends a tooth-colored filling to replace the last part of your tooth. If a large part of the dental crown has been lost, the dentist will offer a cap or artificial crown Instead.
Exposed Pulp
If you have an injury and your pulp is exposed, the dentist might recommend a root canal. During the root canal, the damaged pulp it’s removed. Then, your dentist in Smile Scarsdale cleans and disinfects the inside surfaces of the tooth and places a filling to eat to seal the space.
Injuries to the Back Teeth
These injuries include fractured cusps requiring a root canal treatment and full coverage dental crown.
Serious Injuries such as Split Tooth
If you experience a serious injury to your tooth, the dentist might recommend it be extracted completely.
Subluxation
You practice a flexible splint to help stabilize your tooth for two weeks. After that, ensure you take a soft diet, such as smoothies and soups. Also, keep monitoring your tooth after it has stabilized.
Extrusion
Your dentist will reposition your tooth, which will take two weeks to stabilize with a splint. They will then monitor your tooth’s vitality; if the tooth is not vital, you will need a root canal. Ensure you take a soft diet after the treatment. The pulp of your tooth is monitored, and if it’s devitalized, the dentist will recommend a root canal treatment.
Lateral Luxation
The tooth is repositioned and stabilized with a splint for a month or four weeks. Ensure you take soft diets and monitor the pulp in case root canal therapy is needed.
Intrusion
The treatment of intrusion includes spontaneous eruption, an option for baby teeth that are not fully developed.
It’s also treated by orthodontic repositioning; severe intrusions are treated through surgical positioning.
For prognosis, ankylosis or reception is a risk to the intruded teeth. Therefore root canal treatments will prevent resorption within three to four weeks.
Avulsion
The teeth are repositioned and splintered for two weeks. If you drop the tooth on a dirty surface, the dentist will administer a tetanus vaccine to you. Then a root canal treatment will be needed within 7 to 10 days. After the treatment, you must take a soft diet and use a mouth guard to protect your tooth when involved in contact sports.
Fracture Teeth Roots
The initial treatment of the fracture is to stabilize fragments with a splint. Also, depending on the severity of the fracture, the pulp might be removed.
Who Treats Dental Trauma?
General and pediatric dentists treat all kinds of tooth problems. After your injury, you’ll call the dentist immediately, seeking medical care to sustain the dental trauma.
In dentistry, endodontists treat injuries you have teeth using advanced techniques and skills to save them. If you’re looking for treatment of dental trauma in Westchester, our dentist will address your problem and help you relieve the pain caused by it.