Dental restorations affect far more than just the quality of your smile. They can be crucial to influencing your health and happiness. They may even be the one thing you need to ward away problems like gum recession and bruxism. Let's examine six compelling reasons to opt for dental restorations.

1. Reduce Teeth Grinding
When you have lasting damage to one or two teeth in your mouth, your smile become uneven. This can affect how your teeth sit together, which in turn can encourage the grinding of your teeth. Grinding your teeth, an act known as bruxism, can damage your teeth further, cause gum recession, and make your jaw hurt. Restorations help to restore your smile to the way it should be. Your dentist can further help you alleviate any effects of bruxism through medications and mouth guards.

2. Ward off Gum Recession
Gum recession can quickly cause other health problems if not treated. It can eat away at the soft tissue of your mouth and the bone underneath to allow your teeth to simply pop free from their sockets. One way to prevent gum recession is to ensure your mouth is as it should be. This means opting for procedures like dental implants that act like your natural teeth. Implants can increase quality of life and fix many dental problems that worry you.

3. Reduce Stress
A suboptimal smile can make you fret. You may have nightmares about it, or you may suffer from severe depression and anxiety while thinking about how others perceive your smile. This can create the kind of stress that leads to heart disease, diabetes and stroke. It can even increase your chances of catching things like the common cold by significantly suppressing your immune system. By restoring your teeth, you can greatly reduce your stress and begin to relax.

4. Prevent Gum Disease
When tissue that resides in the mouth becomes damaged, it makes for a hospitable environment for bacteria. It makes their home there, which in turn allows it to damage tissue further. This can lead to everything from toothaches to infection of the gum and jaw bone. By giving bacteria fewer places to hide, you're doing your entire body a favor. You may even be saving yourself from things like kidney disease given new evidence that links it with the presence of bacteria in your mouth.

5. Repair and Replace Damaged Tissue
Even when damaged tissue doesn't become infected, it can still cause a plethora of problems in your mouth. It can cause your teeth to hurt, make teeth more sensitive to hot and cold items, or make your mouth more prone to injuries from chewing hard foods. Dental restoration is the only way to prevent these problems from becoming more dangerous. Something as seemingly small as an abscessed tooth can result in an infection that moves to your jawbone before infecting your blood.

6. Keep Soft Tissues Safe
Damage to your mouth puts the soft tissue inside of it at risk. You might have chipped teeth or sharp features on your teeth that can act like small knives to the soft tissues of your mouth. Some people have even managed to pierce their own tongues with their teeth while sleeping. This makes damaged teeth a very real danger. Restorations can remove sharp edges and make your teeth shaped like they should be. Doing so prevents damage to the soft tissue of your mouth, which could lead to further problems that could put your entire body's health at risk.

While dental restorations do function to help with the aesthetics of your mouth, their main purpose is to restore function to your teeth and mouth. Advanced types of restorations like implants can help reduce the risk of encountering things like gum recession and gingivitis, which in turn keeps your mouth and entire body safer.

Informational credit to Advanced Dental Prosthetics.

Author's Bio: 

Anita is a freelance writer from Denver, CO and often writes about family, health, home and lifestyle. A mother of two, she enjoys traveling with her family when she isn't writing.