Hi, I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton of HPS Advanced Dental Care, located in Macomb County Michigan. I want talk about dentures today; dentures and partials. We have patients that come in to see us, either needing dentures or partials or already having dentures and partials and needing new ones. You get a lot of questions about, how long do dentures typically last? How long do partials usually last? Should I just have all my teeth pulled out, because it’ll just be easier to maintain? I kind of want touch upon some of these questions that we get a lot from our patients that might be interested in dentures and partials. One of the big things that our teeth do besides chewing and talking and looking nice, is having a happy healthy smile- they maintain the bone that’s in our jaws. When we pull our teeth out we lose the bone that the tooth is supporting.
So, if you any of you have ever seen somebody. (I’m trying to think if there are any TV actors that come to my mind). But have you’ve ever seen somebody that, they take out their dentures, and their faces get very collapsed looking? Like, they clearly look like they don’t have any teeth. That’s for two reasons. If somebody just has their teeth removed, I can go in and take out somebody’s teeth. They still look pretty normal besides the fact that there are no teeth there. But their bone structure is still pretty normal after years. And the most of this bone reabsorption or bone dissolving, I guess you would call it, happens in that first year. It continues to progress over the years. And what happens is, is that, the bone, you start to lose it. So, over a period of time it makes you look older because you don’t have that nice bone support in your jaws. So when people ask, well, should I just get all my teeth removed? Because that way I don’t have to come in here and get them cleaned. Or you know they’re just aggravating to me or whatever the situation is. It’s an option. I always recommend to people, not a good option. Because we start losing that bone, we start looking much older at a very, very earlier age. On top of all those things, besides just aesthetics, and speech, in chewing we have an issue with how your dentures actually fit. I tell people, my Grandfather was 102 when he passed away and he had dentures for about 60 years. I made him his last set of dentures when he was 100 and he was very proud that he was the oldest dental patient I have ever worked on. But his bone had resorbed significantly and so I told him Grandpa you know, it’s going to be hard to hold these dentures in because you have basically a flat surface and putting another flat surface on especially on the lower jaws, very had to keep those dentures in over a period of years. There always going to be sliding around a little bit.
The biggest complaint we get from people who have had dentures for a long period of time, is, I just can’t eat salad anymore. Or, it’s hard for me to eat a sandwich with luncheon meat in it. Because salad, you know lettuce leaves and luncheon meat is so thin and so fine. It’s hard to get that grip on it that we want. So then we start looking at possibly doing implants on patients to help hold those dentures in place. And that’s a whole other topic that we can talk about. But, I guess my answer to all those of you that are looking at, maybe I just want to get my teeth taken out and get some dentures made. Try and keep them. We have a lot of really good ways that we can try and keep as many teeth as we can and we’d love to help you out with doing that. So if you have any questions about partials or dentures, give us a call at 248-652-0024.
