Many people pay more attention to adult teeth as the adult teeth will accompany us throughout the majority of our lifespan. While this is true, it is also very important to pay special attention to our baby teeth.
Toddlers who are teething at this stage, are also starting to take in semi-solids and converting from liquid to solid food. Our baby teeth play a vital role here to chew well so that the food get digested properly, and absorb nutrients for growth.
What causes tooth decay?
Tooth decay happens to children as well as adults.
To understand more about what causes tooth decay, we need to know how a tooth structure is like and how it gets the destruction from external factors.
Every tooth typically has 4 main parts
Tooth decay typically starts from the outer layer of the tooth (enamel). It is caused by bacteria and other things such as food that contains sugar that are left on the teeth. For a child, the most common ‘sugars’ are milk, sugary drinks, fruit juices, cereals and bread.
As our mouths naturally have bacteria, these bacteria will change the nature of the remnant of food trapped in between our teeth to produce acid. With the combination of bacteria, foo remnants, acid and our own saliva, a substance known as plaque is formed on our teeth. Over a period of time, the acid will corrode our tooth structure, mainly our enamel, resulting in tooth decay.
How does night milk causes tooth decay?
Milk contains high sugar contents. For children who have the habit of drinking milk in the middle of the night, they do not get the chance to rinse off the milk that remain in their mouths. In some cases, these children go to sleep with a milk bottle in their mouth, soaking their teeth in the milk throughout the night!
This is almost the same as sucking on a lollipop for a long period of time. We need a substantial time to dissolve a lollipop, that’s a lot of sugar-soaking time.
Symptoms of tooth decay in a child
These are some of the observations you may find when a child has tooth decay.
The symptoms vary from child to child. Not every child will feel the same sensitivity, discomfort or react to the decay. Some children won’t even feel anything until their visit to the dentist. It is important to maintain good daily oral habits and routine dental checkups.
At Smile Design Dental Practice, we help you to monitor you and your child’s oral conditions. On every routine dental visit, our dentist will take intra-oral photographs to monitor the teeth conditions. Through the comparisons from these photos from previous and current visit, we can propose appropriate treatment for the child.
How do we prevent it?
We need to first establish proper oral hygiene, cleaning and adopt healthy oral habits. Prevention is always better than cure. We have also identified several common causes of tooth decay in a child.
For those children who already have early signs of tooth decay, parents have to identify the source of the problem, such as…
Maintenance and prevention
We encourage all our patients including young children to maintain regular dental checkups. Dental issues can be easily picked up during the dental visits. It is better to solve dental issues while they are in the early stage, your child can possibly avoid feeling pain or discomfort and higher cost of treatments.
For more information and consultation, please contact Smile Design Dental Practice at +65 6463 8588.
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Please contact us to schedule for an appointment.