Dentures. Why do so many olde people have dentures?

[Fordian]

It has occurred to me a couple of times.

I work in health care and see The Ages of Dentition 😊

No one under 40 has a filling. Everyone from 40-70 has a face like a Cornish tin mine. Everyone older has dentures.

Why?

Please, I'm not looking for any 'Well, I'm 80 with a full set of natural teeth'- I'm generalising 😂

But given that the older folk didn't encounter a grain of sugar on their entire youth (if you were to believe my mother, RIP, b. 1933)... why?

What changed? What factors came into play?

Bad practice (paid per tooth filled or extracted) for my mum.
She had a dodgy dentist when she was a child. All her milk teeth were filled with no good reason. Then her adult teeth 'to make them stronger' . They've given her bother ever since.

For my grandparents generation, having all your teeth removed was seen as a preventative measure. They weren't causing pain yet, but undoubtedly they would in the future.

Rather barbarically the grandma of a friend had all her teeth removed as a twenty first birthday present (1930s).

@julieca

When I was young the public health information was either to brush your teeth before going to bed, or eat an apple.

You must be older than me.

It was 'brush your teeth' by the 1960s

And there was even one to tell you not to eat anything after you'd cleaned your teeth at bedtime (remember because the child who was being told 'no' had a massive gobstopper and I was envious!

I’m early fifties and went to the dentist regularly as a child. I have two or three fillings but I’m not sure they were even necessary. But we were advised to brush our teeth once a day back then and we did have very sugary diets in the 70s. My parents have dentures - my dad had an accident as a teen which knocked his teeth out. I suspect my mum had hers taken out because of problems with jaw formation, which I also had but had an operation to rectify it instead.

My child is ten and I know two of her close friends who have fillings. When I was ten, we all had them!

I have also heard older family members talk about getting a full set of dentures for their 21st.

My mum is in her nineties. She and all her siblings had all their teeth removed when then were in their thirties and dentures fitted. Mum said it was because there weren't dentists during the war, but I can't see that this would have required all her teeth to come out. My dad had his own teeth.

It's interesting, and rather ageist that all the younger posters think that good NHS dental care wasn't available to people in their 60s .

Both of my parents had a full set of dentures, but they were born in 1909 and 1918, and people of that generation generally did have dentures.

I was another whose dentist got paid more for putting in fillings where they probably weren't needed. My dad really suffered from this.

Plus I don't remember any focus on flossing or fluoride etc. Toothpaste alone has become more advanced, offers more benefits etc.

Dentist removed most of my dads teeth as a child. They would be more inclined to do fillings and fix them now.

Better dentistry

And reduction in smoking.

I don't think I know any non-smokers with dentures.

My dad, born 1925, had all his teeth removed when he was 42 (which was coincidentally the year I was born so I never knew him with his own teeth). He told me that the reason was that he had a lot of tooth decay due to sucking mints a lot as a teenager & young man - presumably to freshen his breath after smoking, which he started at 14. I once asked my mum if his teeth had really been as bad as all that and she claimed not to be able to remember, but thinking sensibly about it, I can’t imagine that he really had a mouthful of rotting pegs (as my fevered teenage brain was imagining ). As far as I can tell from old photos, his smile looked ‘normal’. I think there was possibly just a lot of decay in the molars, dentists then weren’t easily able to treat things like root canals or abscesses, and so it was simpler in the long term to remove damaged or heavily filled teeth. And presumably once all the molars were out, it was necessary to take out the front ones as well so that dentures could be fitted, or people wouldn’t have been able to chew.

By contrast, my mum who was born in 1936 had a full mouthful of pretty healthy teeth with only an average (for the time) number of fillings. This despite the fact that she went over the handlebars of her bike aged 14 and knocked her front teeth heavily on the road. They didn’t come out, but the accident ‘killed the nerve’ (her phrase - not sure if this is technically a thing!) and they were very yellow for the rest of her life. There was never any talk about pulling them out though.

I’m 53 and don’t have a single filling, despite having a much more sugary diet than I should. (I did have a few in my baby teeth, and possibly in my adult pre-molars but these were extracted when I was 13 to relieve overcrowding in my mouth - nothing to do with the health of the actual teeth). I put this down to the fact that I had a very progressive dentist as a child, who gave me two or three intensive fluoride treatments. Basically you had to sit for half an hour biting down into this gel which tasted like extremely strong toothpaste. I was 11/12/13 ish, so this would have been at the very start of the 1980s.

Shortly after this, I believe these treatments were banned as they exceeded safe fluoride limits or something. But gosh, I’m so glad I had them. My teeth are basically impregnable. Every dentist I’ve ever seen since then has commented on how hard they are! If I eventually lose them, it’ll be due to my gums and not the teeth themselves.

My grandfather had all his (perfectly good) teeth removed for his 21st birthday and replaced with dentures. It was commonly done as a preventative measure. He was born in about 1910.

1950s childhood. Sugar, sugar, sugar. Sugar in tea - many people had three or four teaspoons per cup). Sweetened milk. Sugary squash. Sugar on fruit (we used to be given apple and orange slices dipped in sugar, strawberries were always served with sugar). Puddings. Sweets.
Poor dental hygiene and lots of childhood fillings and extractions.
All this was commonplace, possibly partly as a reaction to sugar rationing during the war years and beyond.

I know 60, 70 years plus, in some areas, girls upon leaving school, in some families would have all their teeth removed, as it would save on dentist bills in the future and be easier to be a more attractive option for marriage because of that.
I read this in a novel, but then researched it and it's TRUE, ouch!

I’ve not had a filling and always been told my teeth are good. Then I turned 40 and suddenly they were saying I had early peridontal disease and at risk of losing my teeth without aggressive cleaning and flossing. Your bone mass/density declines with age.

If I didn’t go to the dentist the first I’d have know. would have been my teeth falling out.

I think menopause can cause gums to deteriorate quickly. My teeth were always praised by my dentist but quite suddenly she started to see issues. I'm hoping HRT will slow down any more deterioration but I had a bad and expensive year of needing lots of hygienist appointments, despite always having been very careful, and treatment for receding gums. If I hadn't been able to pay for all this I could well have lost a tooth or two later on.

I'm sure I read once that it's because we really shouldn't have such long lives but because of medicine /technology humans are now living much longer than is natural and our teeth aren't meant to last that long. I can't remember where I read it and it could be bollocks though.

And yes, smoking.

I'm a child of the 50s, from a large family. Quite often we didn't have any toothpaste and cleaned our teeth with salt. When we did have tooth paste, it was a sort of paste in a flat tin, nothing like we use today. However, we did have regular dental check-ups.

Young women often had their teeth removed and a full set of dentures as a wedding present or similar.

My nana had hers for her 21st birthday.

It was to prevent painful decay and costly treatment later in life.

It was similar to people getting veneers today. Just cosmetic.

DH and I are both mid 50s. He grew up in central Scotland where natural fluoride is low and his diet was poor- as a result he has a mouth full of fillings. I grew up in South west England where natural levels are high and had a healthy diet. My teeth are good.
When I was working in the water industry fluoride wasn't added to the water because its a health authority decision, not a water company decision, to add it to the supply ...and as water company supply areas aren't necessarily the same as health authority boundaries it would be almost impossible to implement.

My teeth look perfect from the outside but I've had 3 back ones removed and I've had a few fillings. I brush, floss and use mouthwash, I don't drink sugary drinks. I eat sweet stuff no more than the average person but my teeth are just decaying. One cracked in half while I was eating a nut. This all started when I started having babies, each time I lost a tooth I was pregnant.

Interesting. I'm 63 and have several fillings, all of which were done when I was aged between 7 and 15.
When I was 15 we moved to another county and so I started seeing a different dentist.
I've moved twice more since then and (apart from 2020) have had 6-monthly check ups for the last 33 years. I've never needed any treatment other than scale and polish.
My mother died aged 92, having had very few fillings and no extractions.

I'm thinking two things: firstly that my childhood dentist probably performed unnecessary fillings in order to get more payments from the NHS; secondly that the strength of ones teeth is genetically determined to a large extent.

Then in my late 30s I got pregnant and had HG. My teeth literally got the life sucked out of them from the inside I think !! I was getting drained of everything to ensure the baby got what they needed plus being sick rotted them from the outside. Absolutely horrific . 2 just cracked and fell out the rest are ruined

Undiagnosed coeliac disease ruined my teeth, they're crumbling now in my early 40s. It's not something I talk about much though, as there's often the attitude that all dental problems are self inflicted and down to poor dental hygiene. I've never had any form of treatment from a routine dental appointment, but have had to have several teeth removed/repaired after disintegrating with no warning.

I’m mid 40s with one filling.
My son has a mouthful of dental work and a bridge (road accident)
Parents don’t have dentures.

It’s likely a combination of the NHS, fluoride in the water and more knowledge of how to care for your teeth.

Mine are fine, only one composite filling, had none as a teenager.