The clenching and grinding of teeth can be an annoying habit, but it can also pose a severe risk to your oral health. This behavior can occur for a number of reasons, including heightened stress levels. You might not even realize that you do it as it can sometimes happen as you sleep.
Still, you should talk to your dentist if you have this habit to resolve it as soon as you can. Your smile may encounter irreversible damage without intervention from a dentist. Read to find three dental concerns that can develop if you continue grinding and clenching your teeth.
Oral Health Problems Caused by Teeth Grinding
Tooth Breakage
Your teeth experience everyday wear and tear when you bite, chew, and perform other oral functions. Though they endure these actions without issue, your teeth are not indestructible. High amounts of pressure, like what is generated by teeth grinding and clenching, may cause your teeth to break.
A crack, chip, or fracture in the tooth may hurt the way that your smile looks. But this injury also puts your dental health at risk. This tooth breakage can deepen over time, allowing bacteria and plaque to infiltrate and severely harm your tooth.
You should seek prompt restorative treatment, such as a dental crown, for this type of damage. But you can prevent tooth breakage by stopping a grinding habit as soon as possible.
Damaged Dental Work
Just as the pressure from clenching and grinding can hurt your teeth, it may also harm your prior dental work. A majority of people have treated a cavity with a dental filling in their lives. The filling cures and seals into place in the tooth where it can remain for ten years.
But constant grating from bruxism, another term for teeth grinding, may cause the filling to wear down. This could lead the filling to loosen or dislodge from the tooth. The vulnerable and damaged part of the tooth will then be exposed to external dental dangers.
Preserve fillings and other dental fixtures by avoiding abnormal pressures. Your dentist can offer advice for stopping chronic bruxism.
Chronic Jaw Pain
The pressure of bruxism can extend from the teeth to the gums and ultimately reach your jaw. This may lead to heightened tension in the muscles of the jaw. It may start to chronically ache or have trouble moving as it should.
These symptoms will worsen if teeth grinding and clenching do not cease. Then the condition can develop into temporomandibular joint disorders, also known as TMJ.
This damage to the joint of the jaw may spread to other concerns, including frequent headaches, earaches, and a clicking sound in the jaw. Your dentist will need to treat TMJ with targeted therapy. The symptoms will not go away on their own.
You can avoid this necessary dental work by stopping the habit that will lead to this disorder. Consider stress relief, custom-made mouthguards, and other activities to get rid of chronic bruxism.