Facial Collapse
A diagram showing facial collapse (image courtesy of Dr. Carl E. Misch, from his textbook, Dental Implant Prosthetics)
One of the most serious consequences of losing all your teeth is that your body begins to remove the bone that used to support the teeth. Over a period of ten or twenty years, this produces a condition called facial collapse.
What is Facial Collapse?
The diagrams on the right illustrate this process. Your body senses that the teeth are missing, so it takes the minerals from the jawbone to use them elsewhere in the body.
- Your jawbone thus begins to shrink.
- Horizontally, they sink into the face.
- Vertically, they shorten the lower face between the nose and the chin.
This produces the look you see on the right. The face looks withered and old.
There are two pieces of good news here, though.
- The first is that this can be prevented if, when your teeth are extracted, dental implants are placed. The body senses the presence of the dental implants as if they were teeth and doesn’t dissolve away.
- The second piece of good news is that if you have already suffered facial collapse, a combination of bone grafting and dental implants may be able to restore your face and its youthful appearance.
Other Consequences of Facial Collapse
The appearance of age, however, is actually the least of the worries of a person suffering from this condition. The worst part is that you may not even be able to comfortably wear a denture.
- A removable denture rests on the jawbone. If there is little jawbone left, the denture will just float around on movable tissue.
- What little bone there is, also, will have all the pressure of the denture on the small, sharp ribbon of bone that is left, which can become very uncomfortable.
- People in this situation resort to denture pastes to hold the denture in, but even the paste has its limitations. At some point, many will just give up and leave their dentures in a drawer.
This is an excerpt of an e-mail from a woman named Nancy, and it illustrates the frustration of people suffering from facial collapse: “Is there anything that can be done to the lower jaw bone to stop it from curling forward and getting shorter? It does not hold up my bottom plate so it hits my lip crevice and causes massive blisters. I have to completely remove my teeth in order to eat without pain.”
If you are concerned about facial collapse, give The Houston Dentists a call. You can come in and have a complimentary consultation. We will look at your mouth, take some photographs, and discuss your goals for your oral health.
We will tell you what you can realistically expect from treatment, and give you a chance to see if Dr. Hedge or Dr. Frazar are the right cosmetic dentists for you. That’s how we like to introduce ourselves – no pressure or commitment to pay anything until you know what you are getting.