Gum Disease Treatment
If your gums look red or swollen or bleed easily when you brush and floss, there’s a good chance it’s gum disease, also called gingivitis. Gum disease is a bacterial infection that often develops due to poor or inconsistent brushing and flossing.
Healthy gums are essential because they are the structure that holds your teeth in place. If we don’t treat gingivitis promptly, it progresses to periodontitis or severe gum disease that can eventually lead to tooth loss.
How Gum Disease Affects Your General Health
Even more problematic than tooth loss is that chronic gum infections are linked to numerous health conditions. Diabetes, heart and lung disease, stroke, dementia, and low birth weight babies are all conditions tied to gum disease.
How Does Gum Disease Develop?
Gum disease is also called periodontal disease, and it often occurs because of a buildup of plaque and tartar on your teeth. Plaque is a film that collects on your teeth and consists of saliva, bacteria, and food particles.
Brushing and flossing remove a good amount of plaque but not from every surface of your teeth. The plaque your brush and floss miss turns into tartar, a very hard substance that only a dental hygienist can remove with special instruments.
Gingivitis Treatment
Gingivitis is the early stage of gum disease, which causes inflammation and bleeding gums. We can easily treat gingivitis with professional teeth cleaning at our Hempstead, NY, dental office. Dr. Desai will also explain how you can improve your oral hygiene habits to ensure your teeth are clean and your gums stay healthy.
How Periodontitis Develops
It’s common to miss gingivitis symptoms because they can be subtle, and you might not recognize what they mean. As it advances, bacteria work their way under your gums and open pockets where even more bacteria can hide.
As the pockets increase, your gums start pulling away from your teeth. The infection advances to attack the tooth’s supporting bones and ligaments, causing them to loosen. Without periodontitis treatment, you are at serious risk for tooth loss.
While gingivitis is reversible, periodontitis is not. We can control the disease and prevent it from progressing, but we can’t undo the damage it has already done to teeth’s supporting structures.
How We Treat Periodontitis
Periodontitis treatment involves an advanced deep cleaning procedure called scaling and root planing. Steps include scaling, which removes plaque and tartar from all tooth surfaces above and below the gumline.
Root planing means we smooth the tooth’s root surfaces to remove places where bacteria can collect and help the gums reattach the tooth more easily.
Because scaling and root planing is a complex procedure, we plan it over several appointments, so you spend less time in the dental chair. We also numb your mouth to ensure you won’t feel any pain.
Who Is at Risk for Developing Gum Disease?
Anyone can develop gum disease, but it most commonly occurs after age 30. Others at increased risk are smokers, patients with diabetes, and pregnant women. Older people are at particularly high risk, and estimates say as much as 70% of those over age 65 have gum disease.
Schedule a Teeth Cleaning with Us Today!
If it’s been six months or longer since your last hygiene appointment, we recommend scheduling a teeth cleaning at our Hempstead, NY, dental office soon. Dr. Desai will provide thorough teeth cleaning, and if he spots signs of gum disease, he will plan prompt treatment to protect your smile.
