Causes & management for loss of tooth enamel - Dr. Aarthi Shankar

Basically there are 3 types of tooth wear. It is called attrition, abrasion and erosion. So what is attrition? Attrition is when the biting and the chewing surfaces are worn out. It happens when you do tooth grinding or you have a habit of chewing pan parag or betel nuts. So this kind of wearing takes years together to happen and sometimes it can give you a very disfigured look to your tooth. So what is the treatment for such conditions? Correction of the problem, that is if you are having a tooth grinding habit, you will be given something called the night guard which is a soft rubber – kind of material which is worn on your tooth when you are sleeping when the activity of tooth grinding is maximum. So you can reduce the harm done to your tooth through that. If you are having a habit of pan parag or betel nut chewing, the habit has to be reduced and stopped. After all this is done, the tooth can be brought back to its original shape through tooth coloured fillings or tooth coloured crowns, depending upon the options chosen by the patient. The other type of tooth wear is called abrasion. This happens due to wrong method of tooth brushing. When you do aggressive method of brushing for a long period of time, it results in wedging of the tooth in the sides of your tooth. This causes sensitivity So the treatment includes correction of the method of brushing and followed by tooth coloured filling. The last type of tooth wear is called erosion. This happens when you have lot of acidic food in your diet, like soft drinks, lemon and in some instances, your stomach acids can come upto your mouth and this can also harm your tooth,. In such cases you will have extreme sensitivity tocold and sweet foods. So how do we correct this? First we have to correct the cause. Try to reduce the amount of acidic food in your diet like soft drinks, lemon, directly chewing on lemon, something like that and if you have stomach acids coming upto your mouth, you have to take appropriate medication with a prescription of a physician to control the stomach acid and then we can go in for a tooth coloured filling to happen the wear happening through erosion. So basically the treatment for all three types of wear is tooth coloured filling, which is called composite, which is matched to the shade of your tooth according to the colour and then it is filled and thereby the lost is filled up. The other option is crowns. There are 2 types of crowns, ceramic fused to metal, that is basically porcelain fused to metal or all ceramic. Both gives you excellent looks. The latest advancement is called zirconia, which is full of ceramic and gives you excellent esthetics and a very good smile makeover.