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?

[quote woodhill]@Lovesabadboy

That's interesting- similar age and had fillings, then my teeth seemed to improve in the 90s[/quote]
Oh yes, @woodhill

Same here.
The dentist retired and shut down the practice. By that time, I was older, had left home and so signed up with another much more modern practice and have had 2 fillings in the past 29 years...whereas I seemed to be having one every 6 months at the old -butchers-- dentist!
I did have to have some of the original fillings replaced as they degraded, but apart from that, I have had no major problems with my teeth (touch wood!)

strike through fail - sorry!

My DMum now in her 70 had a partial plate by her mid 40 - she blamed 3 pgs.

I think Dsis and I haven't had the issues she did with pg and teeth- partially as we took prenatal vitamins before during and after - plus probably grew up with better food than she did.

DDad may end up with a plate soon late 70s - but he had chronic ill health now for a few decades - lots of conditions and it catching up with him and now impacting on dental health - those he's always had teeth issues crowns fillings.

I do think dentists are slower to take teeth out or fill these days - and electric tooth brushes are supposed to be better than manual brushing - floride and flossing much more common.

My parents teeth are in better shape than my DGP were at same age - and I'm currently better than them when they were my age.

I also read suggestions that previous generations may have exposure to one type of antibotic or other medicine that adversly affected tooth development.

I'm in my late 40s and have quite a few fillings. But sadly in the 70s (maybe earlier) and early 80s there was a "drill and bill culture" which meant that if you "needed" a filling a huge hole would be dug in your tooth and a filling put in which eventually needed to be replaced. I was really rubbish at cleaning my teeth but I did go to the dentist regularly.

My son has been really rubbish at cleaning his teeth too. And probably eats more sugar than I did as there is more of it in processed foods these days. I don't know if we live in a fluoridated area. But he has no fillings at all.

When I was about 25, a dentist told me asked me if I was a chocoholic and said I had caries in every tooth! You can imagine I was pretty shocked. Nearly 25 years on, I've had one new filling (which was a tiny surface one) and the only other work done has been sorting out the problems caused by what I were unnecessary fillings in my childhood.

And for people older than me, they just used to pull teeth out.

However, many elderly people have looked after their teeth and have implants and bridges/crowns rather than dentures. But you need the ££££ for that.

(So I clearly didn't have caries in every tooth at 25. I don't know what she was talking about. A degree of remineralisation can occur, but not in every tooth).

The tales of having every tooth out are making me shudder, I had a tooth out today and I'm in so much pain from it! Whole mouth must be agony. This is the first thing I've every had done by a dentist, apart from checkups. My teeth are great in fact, I only had this one random wisdom tooth out as it came in wonky.

And maybe it could have been saved if there was any access to dentists here- in Cornwall right now there is a 4-5 year waiting list for the NHS, which covers all NHS dentists. I was on this list for 2 years when I called to check and I had been removed for some reason, I had no notice of this. So I had to restart! I ended up saving up and paying private as literally the only way of sorting this out. And that was a 3 month wait for first appointment. I'm sure there will be many people with dental issues, dentures and stuff, coming from this area.

I'm 40, thought I'd looked after my teeth reasonably well, but my teeth are terrible. I've had root canal treatment on about 7 teeth.

My dentist has worked very patiently to keep patching me up, however I can easily imagine that if dental technology was less sophisticated I'd have had several teeth removed by now. In fact I've had one recently where it took several sessions to complete and I came close to asking them just to pull it out because I despaired of being pain free.

I remember getting a sticker after the dentist with cartoon characters on, and sometimes they said things like "Brush twice a day" but often they said "No fillings today!" which is bizarre to imagine children having them so routinely! I had them in all my baby molars DS1 hasn't had any.

One of my Grandmas (late 80's) has dentures, but she's very working class and that was the option accessible to her. My other Grandparents (early 90's) have veneers/crowns just for the teeth that needed them as they were able to afford that.

My parents (late 50's) have quite a lot of fillings, most of them they got in their 20's. They grew up in areas without fluoridation in their water and both talk about dental education being more lax than it was when my generation were kids.

I remember my Mum diligently giving us flouride supplements in the 90's on the advice of our dentist. Our water company began flouridation in the early 00's. I'm early 30's and haven't had a single cavity or filling, same for my siblings who are slightly younger and my husband who also grew up with water fluoridation in the US.

No one under 40 has a metal coloured filling.

I'm 35 and all my fillings are silver coloured. I remember being given fluoride tablets as a child because it wasn't added to the water in GM.

Like many others of my age (early 50s) I had Fisher Sealing done when I was about 10 which protected teeth for approx 10 years.... I don't think it's a coincidence that between age of 20-22 I ended up with a mouthful of fillings ( as the sealing wore away the teeth couldn't cope with sudden exposure & were vulnerable). This maybe complete bollocks but I really believe it - no other fillings needed before or since!

@BertieBotts OMG the ‘No fillings today!’ stickers! I’d completely forgotten that. I used to get those, but I was mortified and used to rip them off the second we got home.

Unfortunately, as a child, I had a dentist who I discovered, much later in life, delighted in making his child patients have fillings, regardless of whether they needed them or not. Hence as an adult, I ended up with a mouth full of amalgam. And a recipe for further dental difficulties now!

No one under 40 has a filling?!! Is that true, even as a generisation? How come it's so difficult to get an appointment then?

I am late 40s. I had a few fillings in my childhood, but I'm not sure they were unnecessary, because my sister, two years younger, didn't have any, which seemed unfair, as she was the one who added sugar to breakfast cereal and so on, not me. (She has since had a root canal and stuff, so it's balanced out a bit.)

My last two fillings were when I was in the 6th form, and he did white ones, which were new, "but the NHS is paying for this." He had quite strong views on the importance of the NHS and dental health.

Mum and the two of us went for check-ups every 6 months. We kept the same dentist from cutting our first teeth until he retired about a decade ago. Our water wasn't flouridised because we weren't on mains (foarm with a borehole.) But it was a very hard water area (through solid chalk, basically,) and the dentist had some theory about calcium carbonate (limescale) in the water and levels of plaque, though I don't remember the details.

We also had the school dentist, and I remember giving out free disclosing tablets, and we did use them. I don't remember anyone using toothfloss unless they actually had something stuck in their teeth - it wasn't something you did regularly.

I had an extraction either side on my top teeth, as I had very crowded teeth, and now have small gaps, but not enough gap for a whole tooth. My bottom teeth are pretty crowded and a bit uneven as a result, which I suspect may start to cause issues in the future.

Although some people may have suffered unnecessary extractions, I don't think it was a universal practice. I think that the NHS meant many people saw the dentist who otherwise wouldn't have, and still does, even though it can be hard to find an NHS dentist these days. I think there have been changes in dental practice - I now routinely get my teeth x-rayed as part of a check-up. I don't think that was available at all before my teens (so mid-'80s or so,) and at first was on for investigating possible orthodontic work or problems rather than being routine. Though it may just be that it's coincidental timing with me having adult teeth and getting a retainer. But I remember a dentist friend of my parents in another part of the country being excited about the new x-ray machine they got in the practice, and that was mid-'80s. I don't think people talked about seeing the hygienist then, either, whereas that's now routine. And although electric toothbrushes were available in my childhood, they're much more commonly used now, and mine has a timer and stuff, and you can get different heads. Even manual toothbrushes, in the '70s, the only real difference was closing your colour. Now you get different hardnesses of bristle, there might be plastic bits to massage the gums, and fancy stuff like that.

So a lot of problems will be picked up before a filling or removal is necessary, and brush technology and practice means we probably have better hygiene- pretty sure I do, anyway. But there are still those who don't go to the dentist, and don't have good toothbrushes techniques, if they brush at all, so while there are fewer fillings and lost teeth these days, there are also those bucking the trend.

@LazyDragonTooth. If it makes you feel better, you probably wouldn't have been able to save it. All my wisdom teeth were doing strange things and they all had be taken out 10 years ago. I saw the dental consultant at the hospital and there was nothing they could do.

Years ago I remember a practice called ' sugar pieces' as in literally a sugar sandwich. I don't know why, luckily I was never fed this but I knew people who were. My late mother lost all her teeth down to an infection after pregnancy. This was during WW2, you paid for doctors and dentists then. Also the treatment was not known for the gum condition she took. There is much more knowledge now on how to treat gum disease/conditions.

Zero fillings until mid 40s, after 2 pregnancies sort of drained the life out of my teeth. I've always taken good care of my teeth, but I've now had two fillings and two spontaneously cracked teeth.

Not in UK but we were bussed from school to a dental nurses training school so teenage girls could be let looose with drills on our permanent teeth. I was told later that they had a policy of drilling and filling grooves in your molars in case you might have got decay. We had a school dental nurse too and very few children escaped her clutches without a mouthful of fillings either.

No pain relief and manual drill. Of course as we got older those filled teeth were weakened and all sorts of problems started. Now in my fifties I have a crown, fantastically expensive porcelain inlays and an almost visceral hatred of dental nurses. My children have only gone to the same dentist I go to. This dentist is dedicated to saving every scrap of tooth possible. We all go the dental hygienist every six months. My dh is 60. He always went to a dentist and had a few tiny fillings as a teenager. He has regular checkups but had had no work done in over 40 years.

I had ticked that my children received no school dental care but I was still contacted about a "check up". I was rather rude and told them that I'd prefer the dental nurse wasn't even in the same room as my child, let alone looking at their teeth. They also taught a really bad brushing technique which led to gum problems so even when not filling teeth they did harm.

Lots of my compatriots were similarly traumatised. There are lots of dentists who cater for the nervous patient!

I’m mid 40s and don’t have any fillings and my dentist has commented how unusual that is in someone of my age who grew up in the U.K.

I told my mum and she preened about that, taking 100% credit for never allowing me squash or to eat between meals and always making sure I brushed my teeth. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but whatever mum.

Fluoride was added to water in Aus in the 1960s hence my dentist’s comment to me.

The range of dental treatments available and quality of filling materials have come on leaps and bounds. Modern white fillings last much better than older white fillings! We have more materials available and more conservative drills. Better fluoride availability.

It’s also just than longer life = more time for fillings to fail so more likely to need dentures.

But yes all to do with greedy corrupt dentists and nothing to do with people not brushing their teeth.

@Ozgirl75 - your mum is right! Diet is 99% of it!

Depends what age you’re talking, but fluoride is a relatively recent thing and I’m sure has made a huge difference.

Someone I knew, whose mother would probably have been over 100 now, said her DM had urged her to have all her teeth out when she was only in her 20s - ‘Have ‘em all out, love - you won’t regret it.’

It was not uncommon at the time, to avoid both toothache and (presumably) dentists’ bills.

Dh is Dutch, and says that when he got a place at Edinburgh uni on an Erasmus scheme, his mother got him an urgent appointment at their family dentist to have his wisdom teeth removed, to prevent him needing to get it done in Scotland. Such was the reputation of U.K. (and especially Scottish) dentistry in the Netherlands. She was properly paranoid about it and insisted he never visit a Scottish dentist, but should go home for all his check ups.

I was a 70s/80s child and I can remember all my friends having loads of fillings. I didn’t have any, and I smugly assumed it was because I cleaned my teeth better than they did, and my mother was strict about sugar. But actually I was just lucky to have a progressive dentist. I loved going there because he had an amazing fish tank in the waiting room.