Understanding Impacted Teeth and What Wisdom Teeth Are?
(Part 5)
How Impacted Wisdom Teeth Affect Your Health
Impaction of third molars can cause you insufferable pain, bacterial infection, and nerve damage to the teeth in question and their neighboring teeth.
Partially erupted teeth are also infamously difficult to clean. It’s hard to brush or floss from the back of your mouth, leading to gum injury and areas teeming with rotting leftover food and bacteria.
These impactions are more prone to gum disease and tooth decay and other conditions such as pericoronitis.
In fact, impacted wisdom teeth can even cause you headaches from the pressure of the impaction that pushes against the placement of your second and first molars around.
This typically results in agonizing pain that radiates in your jaw, face, and head. This is again caused by a failed eruption because the jaw lacks space for this third set of molars.
Impaction is so problematic that even if it’s a benign impaction that doesn’t cause too much trouble, your dentist is likely to recommend removal because of the risk it poses in the future.
Prevention of Impaction
You can’t prevent wisdom teeth from impaction. However, you can reduce their riskiness for complications. First of all, brush your teeth twice daily and consider having such teeth removed ASAP, before they start becoming issues down the line.
If you’re keeping a regular six-month or semi annual dental appointment, your doctor should scan, find, and monitor the growth and emergence of your wisdom teeth.
Impaction can’t be stopped from occurring but knowing it’ll occur over time should allow you to save up enough money for an easier and less expensive extraction of your third molar or molars.
Regardless, consult your dentist for details. They’ll keep you updated with x-rays or digital scans showing the progress of the wisdom teeth eruption or impaction before any bad symptoms were to happen.
Wisdom teeth removal involves cutting through the gums and extracting the impacted molar bit by bit, even to the point of cutting it up. Removing impacted teeth is a must as a preventative measure or treatment for impaction complications.