Let me ask if this has ever happened to you: You’re sitting in the dental chair and you know you’ve got good home care. You brush twice a day, you floss. You take great care of your teeth, you rinse, you don’t eat bad food, you don’t eat sugary foods, you don’t sip on Diet Coke, yet you come in to see us and wouldn’t you know it? We found two cavities and you’re sitting there, why is this happening to me? My 18-year-old son never brushes his teeth and doesn’t have a cavity, or my husband brushes teeth once a day and never has cavities
Bacteria and Cavities
Hi, I’m Dr. Brett Langston. I’m a Prosthodontist and the owner at Dental Implant and Aesthetic Specialist in Brookhaven, Georgia. When I talk to patients about what causes cavities and why some people get more cavities and other people don’t get cavities, it really breaks down to the kind of bacteria you have in your mouth.
The First Type of Bacteria: Periodontal Disease
The first type of bacteria are the kind that attack the bone and the gum tissue, and those are periodontal disease. And basically what happens is no matter how good a job you brush, how good a job you floss those bacteria attack the bone and the tissue levels. And so what you’ll see is over time that bone and tissue starts to shrink away and the teeth get more and more mobile and then all of a sudden you lose the teeth. Now, sometimes it can be really aggressive periodontal disease, and you can lose all your teeth in your twenties and thirties.
Sometimes it’s a more slowly progressing disease and you don’t start to lose teeth to your middle aged or your later age. Sometimes it can be localized in just one area, but the root cause of that tooth loss is this periodontal bacteria.
The Second Type: Caries-Causing Bacteria
The second type have conic bacteria, which basically means they have the bacteria that attack the tooth structure a new cavity. Every time we see ’em, they do a good job of brushing and flossing, but inevitably have lots of fillings, lots of crown work. Sometimes they lose teeth because that decay has reached the point where we can’t save the tooth.
The Unlucky Patients
The third type of patient I call the unlucky ones because they have both the bacteria that cause cavities and the one that attacks bone. And these patients, I don’t want to say they’re doomed to be without teeth, but it is a large uphill battle because the mouth, if it’s harboring those bacteria, it’s hard to protect the teeth and the bones at the same time.
The Lucky Patients
And the fourth category, I call the lucky ones because those are people that have bacteria that are super friendly to both the teeth and the bone. And it seems like no matter what they do, they’re never going to lose their teeth or get cavities. That category of people can get away with not brushing their teeth as well. Now, it’s not going to do anything for bad breath or anything for plaque or tissue inflammation, but in general speaking, they’ve been the lucky ones that blessed with the right bacteria that don’t attack their bone and tissue.
Advances in Dental Science
One of the neatest things that we have kind of on the horizon in dentistry is we’re starting to learn about periodontal pathogens. And what I mean by that is we can actually do a saliva test now where we can break down the bacteria that you have in your mouth that are really helping us to understand kind of the big bad four or five bacteria that when they’re present in your mouth, are going to cause lots of damage and breakdown.
And so now we’re able to kind of craft a whole approach to eliminate those bacteria from your mouth and give your mouth the chance to kind of heal itself and start fresh. So it’s a really exciting future with the ability to treat teeth and the mouth at a bacterial level, something we haven’t really been able to do in the past.
Conclusion
If you find yourself asking, why are my teeth like this? The answer may not be your fault. It may be those bacteria. So come see us, we can do a saliva test and we can help you figure out why it’s happening. I’m Dr. Brett Langston. I’m here to help you. Watch your mouth.
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