Simple mouthguard can save a lot of dental damage
When athletes step onto the field, often the only thing standing between their teeth and an emergency trip to the dentist is the protection provided by their mouthguards.
For decades, athletes of all ages have protected their pearly whites with that simple soft piece of plastic, shaped to shield each and every tooth from whatever a day may bring.
Dr. Jeffrey Klink, of Cranberry Center Dental Services recommends them for all contact sports.
“They really work, especially in higher impact sports but even wrestling, my son does jujitsu, any of the karates,” he said. “What it does is it really protects the teeth in high impact collisions. It's not foolproof, but it really helps.”
While the mouthguard's main job is to protect the teeth of the wearer, it also offers a number of often unthought of benefits as well.
“The most obvious thing is they protect teeth, but they also help protect against concussions as well,” said Dr. Robert Todd of Butler Smiles Dental Care. “When playing a contact sport and someone takes a blow to the head we have an involuntary response to clench our teeth together.”
The mouthguard cushions that clenching, preventing a more jarring impact and reducing the chance of a concussion.
This supported teeth clench may also be linked to better athletic results, Todd said.
“They've actually done some studies that showed that wearing a mouthguard can actually improve athletic performance,” he said. “They did it on weightlifters. The assumption is having that cushioned clench ... that it's actually advantageous to performance.”
This hypothesis has yet to be tested on other types of athletes, but Todd said it would make sense that at least some of the benefits would transfer.
Still, regardless of any performance improvement, he recommends athletes of all stripes wear mouthguards for protection.
“It's probably not the most complicated topic we deal with, but they're important,” he said. “The worst sports injury I've ever had to treat was a soccer player that got kicked in the mouth.”
When it comes to upkeep, a mouthguard is a simple thing to take care of.
“They're not hard to clean,” Todd said. “What I tell people is to rinse 'em off, use liquid soap. Tooth paste gets pretty yucky. It's not a good idea to soak it in bleach or mouthwash.”
Keep it simple.
“I did have somebody sometime that it got dirty and they put it in boiling water and they got a blob of plastic,” Todd said.
Klink reminds his athletic patients you only have one set of teeth and to do their best to protect them.
“If you damage your teeth, if you damage you're bite, its going to cost you a lot more than a couple hundred bucks. And we can never fix them the way God made them. We're only repairing them. Once you've broken them its simply replacing them with something,” he said.
“You want to protect them and the best way to do that is a custom form fitting mouthguard.”
