Featuring Dr. Angela Demeter, BSc, DDS, MSc, Dip. Perio

Duration: 2 minutes, 4 seconds

It's very important for hockey players to wear mouthguards while they're playing.

It's a very physical sport and serious injuries can be sustained if one is not worn. For example, in the anterior zone is often where the puck or hockey stick would essentially hit and as a result you can sustain injuries where teeth become very mobile, they can fall out, and often it's one or multiple teeth. In addition, the bone can break while the tooth is falling out.

If a hockey player sustains an injury, they should call their dentist right away. There's different scenarios: if the tooth has actually fallen out it can be replaced into the socket on the way to the dentist.

Depending on the scenario, there's many treatment options that we can provide for an injury that has been sustained. The simplest scenario would be if the tooth becomes quite loose, we can splint it and watch it, see if it actually tightens up around it again.

This would be the simplest scenario, unfortunately it often doesn't occur. If the tooth was to break we would have to gently remove, the tooth would have to be removed, and sometimes we would add bone in order to augment the site so that we can preserve it for future implant placement.

So the most common scenario is we would remove the tooth, place the bone graft within the same surgical period, a soft tissue graft, anything in order to build back what's been lost to provide a most natural result. During the healing period, often patients would prefer to have something there so that they're not walking around without teeth.

There are many treatment options available to have the area restored. You can have a removable denture, different types of retainers, so that you would have teeth in the interim. This could be a period of four, to six, to eight months depending on the significance of the trauma.

If people have more questions they can contact their own dentist or their periodontist, the two clinicians can work together in order to help restore your smile in the interim and in the long term, so that you have the most aesthetic and natural result after treatment.

Presenter: Dr. Angela Demeter, Periodontist, Kamloops, BC

Local Practitioners: Periodontist