Edentulous refers to having no or few teeth, caused by disease, accidents, aging or decay. Humans can lose teeth due to poor dental hygiene, with lower socioeconomic status increasing the risk. Tooth loss affects speech, chewing, and facial structure, leading to emotional insecurities. Treatment options include dentures or dental implants.
Edentulous refers to the quality of having no teeth, or few teeth. In humans, tooth loss is usually due to disease, accidents, aging processes or tooth decay. Some animals, however, are thought to be edentulous, such as anteaters, sloths, aardvarks, and other members of the order Xenartha, or formerly Edentata. In animals that need teeth, however, edentulousness can have many negative effects.
Humans can lose their teeth for various reasons, most often due to poor dental hygiene. Common causes include periodontitis or gum disease, tooth decay or tooth decay, and trauma to the mouth. Because routine access to dental care is a key method of preventing tooth loss, the edentulous rate increases with lower socioeconomic status, lower income, and lower educational attainment. This is likely related to the inability of many poor people to afford dental insurance, which inhibits their ability to practice good dental hygiene. Other risk factors for edentulousness include older age, being female, smoking, poor health, chewing tobacco, and poor diet.
Becoming edentulous can pose several problems, functionally and aesthetically. Teeth are essential for the pronunciation of speech. Some sounds may require tongue and teeth contact, such as the sound of “s” or “t” in the English language. People who lack teeth may also have trouble pronouncing English letter sounds like “f” or “v,” which require the lips to touch the teeth. Tooth loss can also pose patients with difficulty chewing.
Teeth also play several roles in maintaining the structural integrity of the face. The vertical dimension of the occlusion, i.e. the height of the bite formed by the contact of the upper and lower tooth rows, determines the shape and length of the cheeks. When a patient becomes edentulous, the mouth closes too completely with no teeth to separate the jaws, thus contributing to a sunken appearance of the cheeks. Without teeth, the cheeks tend to wrinkle, the angle between the nose and the lips changes, the ridges holding the teeth flatten, and the tongue may spread out to fill the space in the open mouth. These modified characteristics, in concert with the cosmetic problem of not showing teeth when smiling, talking or chewing, can also lead to emotional insecurities.
Treatment for edentulous patients can vary depending on how long the patient has been missing teeth and whether the patient is partially or completely toothless. Traditionally, edentulous patients are fitted with a row of removable artificial teeth called dentures. Partial dentures contain a few false teeth to replace part of the missing teeth, while full dentures replace all the teeth in the upper or lower arches of the mouth. Dentures, however, can exacerbate the weakening and flattening of the alveolar ridge or hard gingival ridge where the teeth are implanted.
To solve this problem, dental implants are now available for edentulous patients. A dental implant is a man-made material, such as titanium, that is surgically implanted through the alveolar ridge into the jawbone to replace the tooth root and support false teeth. A denture or artificial tooth can then be fused over the implant. This procedure is much more successful when the alveolar ridge has not undergone severe degradation and can be combined with other reconstructive surgeries to correct facial abnormalities that may result from edentulism.
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