Baby Bottle Tooth Decay

Tooth decay is not a hard thing to understand. 

Sugars from sweets, fruit, milk, etc etc etc etc get into 

someone's mouth. 

The bacteria, naturally occurring in the mouth, ingest the sugars.

The bi-product of this bacteria - sugar combination is acid. 

The acids eat your teeth. 

That's it. 

Soooo, the take home point here is this........

The longer you have sugar in your mouth the more chances there

are for the bacteria to produce the acids that cause decay.

Time + Sugar = Decay

One of the saddest manifestations of this is Baby Bottle tooth decay.

Little tikes that get put to bed with a bottle. 

They will drink a little, fall asleep, wake up and drink a little, then fall asleep.

The result is that they have sugars on their teeth, essentially, all night long. 

Feed your little ones with a bottle if you so choose. 

But then after that make sure to brush their teeth. 

Or, at very least, give them a drink of water to help rinse the sugars away. 

Getting your 2 year old to obey you is tough. 

Getting them to sit still while I drill on their severely decayed teeth ......

nearly impossible. 

Dr Ellis Website

Dr Ellis on Facebook

Dr Ellis on Twitter

Baby Tooth Root Canal

Children's teeth are similar to adult teeth in many ways.

They can both decay.

And the decay can get large enough that it can effect the nerve of the tooth.

In the case of an adult a tooth with an infected nerve would need a root canal.

In a child's tooth it would called a pulpotomy.

In both cases the nerve in the tooth is removed in order to help the tooth stop hurting.

One of the main differences here is the rate of success between the 2 procedures.

Root canals are, typically, very predictable.

Pulpotomys are much less so.

One reason for this is that the roots of an adult tooth are stable.

They have formed and are not going anywhere.

The roots on a child's tooth are ever changing.

The adult teeth coming in behind them are applying more and more

pressure to the baby teeth in order to force them out of the way so

that they, the permanent teeth, may erupt through the gums.

With this ever changing root structure, and not wanting to possibly damage the

permanent tooth under the baby tooth it is much more difficult to get a

pulpotomy to work then it is a root canal.

The one huge advantage that children have over adults in this

situation is that the baby teeth will fall out and the adult teeth shouldn't.

If a pulpotomy does happen to fail then removing the tooth is always

an option. And we just need to wait for the adult tooth to grow into its place.

Dr. Ellis in Facebook

Dr. Ellis Website

Dr. Ellis on Google+