What Causes Tooth Decay

Tooth decay is a treacherous condition as it works to destroy your teeth from within. Far from what other people believe, tooth decay doesn’t start from the outside of the tooth, digging inside until a big cavity erupts. If not detected early, tooth decay can already cause severe damage inside the tooth until its physical symptom, caries, is discovered.

The perfect analogy to explain how tooth decay works to damage your tooth is how a fruit fly attacks a fruit. From the onset, it would be hard to notice the pin size entry of the fruit fly. As time passes, the damage the fruit fly has caused inside would become apparent on the surface. By the time anyone notices that the fruit has severely been spoiled, it is already too late. The fruit fly is more interested in the flesh of the fruit than the skin.

This works the same with tooth decay. The bacteria that causes tooth decay is more interested in the dentine (flesh) of the tooth than its enamel (skin). Like the fruit fly, the bacteria work a tiny hole where they would be able to penetrate inside. Underneath the tiny hole, the damage is expanding on a daily basis. As the bacteria consumes the dentine inside, the enamel then becomes somewhat a shell with nothing inside, in time, the enamel will weaken from the lack of support and crush in itself.

If still undetected and untreated, the bacteria will then progress deeper and get inside the dental pulp, this is the deepest part of the tooth acting as its root and source of nutrients. In the dental pulp you will find the blood vessels and nerve endings of the tooth. This is easily susceptible to irritation and swelling and succumbs to the increase of pressure brought by the inflammation. This causes the pulp to literally stop its own blood supply. The pulp tissue then dies, becomes necrotic and an abscess is created. An abscess may either be acute (painful) or stay in a chronic (not painful) state. The abscess may also evolve into a cyst which does not give out many symptoms. Many have discovered that they have cysts in their gums only when it has grown out of proportion causing other teeth to be moved out of position. In some, the cyst fractures the jaw as it has eaten away the structures around it.

Plaque is always present in our teeth. Even after we brush, plaque can form minutes after we do our teeth cleaning regimen. But, this doesn’t automatically mean that we are already candidates for tooth decay. Bacteria that causes tooth decay only forms when the plaque that is present on our teeth is mature. This means the plaque has been there for a long time. Mature plaque is difficult to remove by brushing and flossing as they have strengthened and bonded to the tooth already. Most of the time, they form in areas where it is hard to clean. This usually means the area between our teeth or in the crevices of the gum line.

Also, our teeth have natural pits and fissures which are very hard to clean. When these pits and fissures are too narrow or deep, the fine bristles of our toothbrush are unable to reach them and flick away the particles that have sunk inside. In time, these fissures and pits become the entry point for bacteria inside the tooth, which will soon develop to tooth decay. In just 20 minutes a dose of sugar can be converted to acid strong enough to start the weakening of the enamel which starts the process of decay. If there is active decay in your mouth or you have existing mature plaque on your teeth and gums, you will continually be susceptible to new formation of decay and other oral problems. If detected early, the bacteria can be removed, the affected tooth treated, and the mature plaque scraped away, it will take a few months before new ones can be developed. That’s why dentists recommend visiting their offices every six months for your check-up.

It’s more constructive in preventing tooth decay from happening if a person classifies the cause of tooth decay into three different categories. Each category requires certain steps to be taken to prevent tooth decay from occurring. The three groups are: fissure cavities, flossing cavities and brushing cavities. These grouping also signify how the decay is caused and how we can prevent it from further developing into gaping cavities.

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