A professor of mine once called stress the silent killer. Stress can cause damage to your teeth by leading to bruxism.
Bruxism is when you clench (tightly hold your top and bottom teeth together) or grind (slide your teeth back and forth over each other) your teeth. Clenching and grinding your teeth puts pressure on the muscles, tissues, and other structures around your jaw. This can damage your teeth by causing fractures that weaken the tooth, chips that can cause new areas of tooth decay, and fracture existing fillings and crowns. Clenching and grinding can also lead to gum recession and exacerbate periodontal problems. In addition, clenching can cause pain in the jaw joint (temporomandibular joint problems), jaw muscles, as well as headaches and possibly earaches.
Patients are often not aware of their own bruxism habit. Bruxism usually occurs when the patient is sleeping. They will often come to the dentist with recurrent fractured or chipped teeth, muscle pain, or diffuse pain in their teeth. A dentist can see evidence of bruxism in the patient’s mouth by looking for wear facets. A wear facet is an area on a biting surface of a tooth that is worn much more excessively than other areas of the tooth. It looks like a small hole and is the point where the grinding teeth touch each other.
The goals of treatment are to reduce pain, prevent permanent damage to the teeth, and reduce clenching as much as possible. NightGuards are used to prevent the teeth from locking together thus helping to prevent the damage from clenching and grinding. I use a hard/soft nightguard. It is soft on the tooth surface and provides a cushion (like a shock absorber) to prevent damage from clenching. The outer surface is hard and smooth so the lower teeth can slide past the upper teeth with no resistance. The cause of bruxism is not completely agreed upon, but daily stress may be the trigger in many people.
