Why Are Children Frequently Involved in Dental Emergencies?
Approximately 50 percent of children are involved in dental emergencies during childhood. Most dental emergencies are preventable using preventive measures to help protect against them. Besides dental emergencies, children are also involved in getting injured in the mouth, and the injuries often occur due to falls, motor vehicle accidents, sports injuries, or altercations.
Mouth injuries are not life-threatening in most cases. Unfortunately, children rarely develop severe complications. However, injuries to the teeth and mouth can leave long-lasting impacts on the child’s appearance and self-esteem.
This article looks at the most common reasons for children’s dental emergencies, evaluation, and treatment of dental and mouth injuries providing information on when to seek help.
What Are the Common Reasons for Dental Emergencies among Children?
Sports-related injuries, altercations, and falls are the most common reasons for dental emergencies among children. However, children can also injure their mouths when they are tipped or pushed when they have an object in the mouth.
Children can also develop dental emergencies from toothaches when they develop cavities because of improper oral hygiene and frequent snacking on sugary and starchy foods. Therefore parents of children must prepare themselves to visit the emergency dentist near you with their children whenever they confront any dental situation.
Precautions for Emergency Dental Situations
Preventing every dental emergency is practically impossible, but many are preventable by using appropriate safeguards against crises. For example, children are better encouraged to wear mouthguards when involved in any sports as a safeguard to protect their teeth from getting knocked out.
Besides getting customized mouthguards for children to safeguard their teeth, parents must also ensure they maintain excellent dental hygiene and refrain from frequently snacking on harmful foods. In addition, getting six-monthly dental checkups for children to determine whether they have tooth decay or any other issue in their mouths gets them a customized treatment plan from pediatric emergency dentistry in Martinsville, VA, providing appropriate precautions to prevent dental emergencies.
Visiting pediatric emergency dentistry will not suffice until you get your child to follow the instructions diligently without forgetting anything. If required, you must compel your child to follow the instructions to prevent dental emergencies from haunting them.
Emergency Cases Tips
Not every dental emergency is similar, and children can get affected by issues that adults may find strange. For example, your child may report a headache late in the evening, a toothache emanating from a cavity and radiating to the head. Children may also report toothaches because of food particles trapped between their teeth even after brushing and flossing. In either case, you may rush to the pediatric dental office in Martinsville only to realize the problem affecting your child’s mouth is entirely different. The dentist may recommend filling the cavity or giving your kid a dental cleaning to ensure the food particles are eliminated from their mouth.
However, whenever children report a mouth injury or a dental problem, parents must ensure they seek medical attention from a dentist and have the child evaluated immediately to ensure no severe issues are bothering them.
Children with pain, tenderness, and sensitivity to temperatures are best evaluated by Dr. Brown to determine whether they have dental pulp infections or dental abscesses in their mouths. In such cases, the dentist might recommend emergency root canal treatment to eradicate the disease festering inside the child’s tooth.
The treatment offered by dentists to children will depend on the child’s age and the type of injury after considering whether the injured tooth is primary or permanent. Children routinely lose primary front teeth. The treatment for these conditions requires management of future damage by giving them space maintainers to ensure the remaining teeth don’t shift position towards the edentulous gap.
Unfortunately, if your child has lost a permanent tooth, long-term follow-up after injury becomes necessary. The child may require follow-up appointments with dentists ranging from weeks to years after the injury.
Children with broken primary teeth must also visit pediatric dentists promptly to determine whether the nerves or blood vessels of the tooth are also damaged. The treatment they require involves smoothing the rough edges and repairing the tooth with tooth-colored dental bonding material.
Children are not diligent with their dental hygiene routine, nor are they careful with the foods they have. Getting into accidents when playing sports or in altercations with their schoolmates is also common. It is why they are prone to getting frequently involved in dental emergencies.
If your kid is frequently reporting dental issues, establish contact with Kids First Dental — Martinsville providing compassionate emergency dentistry treatments for children to have on hand a solution to deal with children’s dental problems.