By Susan MacPhail
FERGUS – Save your teeth from ever being drilled or cut by fillings. Use the easy and preventive treatment known as fissure sealants and floss daily.
Placing fissure sealants on teeth is a cost-effective and comfortable treatment that does not damage teeth and is available for patients of all ages.
Where are fissure sealants placed?
The biting surface of each tooth is formed by multiple lobes of enamel that never completely fuse together.
This causes microscopic weak areas in the coronal enamel of our teeth, called pits and fissures. Most dental cavities occur in these natural fissures.
We have around 100,000 bacteria on each tooth that thrive deep in our enamel fissures, even when we do practice proper oral hygiene.
Every time you eat or drink something sugary, the cavity-causing bacteria in your enamel fissures absorb the sugar and release acid as their waste product.
Within seven seconds, this bacterial acid lowers your saliva pH to 5.5, which can demineralize your tooth’s important calcium phosphate minerals. (Stephans 1977).
High incidences of adult cavities indicate that over time deep fissure lesions inevitably develop into sticky cavities on the biting surface of teeth.
The fissure sealant materials used by professionals today contain calcium phosphate, which helps to heal and repair our demineralized tooth enamel fissures.
Placing preventive healing fissure sealants in our vulnerable teeth is a far superior alternative to having needles and cavity drilling.
– Susan MacPhail is a registered dental hygienist with Dental Hygiene Healthcare, in Fergus.
