If you’ve worn dentures for many years, you are probably aware that they don’t always feel the same way. Like your favorite pair of shoes, after a few years, they just don’t feel like they once did.
Initially not a bad fitting denture!
Unlike shoes, dentures are custom fabricated to fit closely to your jaw and mouth tissues. Many steps during the fabrication process create a very well fitting denture that has intimate contact with the tissues in your mouth. When receiving a new set of dentures, many people will often comment about how good they feel relative to their old, bad fitting denture. Patients state that their old set once felt that good, but just doesn’t feel that way anymore. When asked about their old or current set of dentures, some patients even say, “my dentures hurt.”
A bad fitting denture causes pain!
If dentures are custom made to fit intimately with the tissue and jaw, why would they start hurting months and years down the road? The answer is bone resorption. Bone resorption is a fancy way of saying that the bone dissolves. The jawbone’s main purpose is to support and hold teeth. When teeth are lost, the bone begins to remodel and dissolve. Most of this remodeling occurs during the first 10 months after losing one’s teeth, but remodeling occurs very slowly over the rest of the patient’s life.
A bad fitting denture is loose and moves around often!
As time passes from receiving a new set of dentures, small amounts of bone remodeling can result in tissue changes in the mouth causing one’s denture to not fit like it once did. The denture can become a little (or a lot) loose. The looseness can translate to the denture moving around more and then causing some sore spots.
If the dentures still look good and the teeth are not worn, these comfort issues can often be corrected with a denture reline. If you have to use more and more denture adhesive to hold your denture in place, you might benefit from a reline.
Schedule your denture fit consultation today at North Dallas Denture Center. A simple test can illustrate how well your denture fits.
