TOOTH CAVITY: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

TOOTH CAVITY
Cavities are a scary word for the children of today. Parents are often worried about keeping kids’ cavity free.

What is a cavity or dental caries?
A cavity develops when a tooth or part of the tooth gets infected with bacteria and breaks down. It develops a hole that can grow bigger and deeper as it progresses.
The three main factors involved in tooth decay are:
1. Tooth
2. Carbohydrate or the sticky foods
3. Plaque or bacteria

The combination of these three factors leads to formation of cavities.
• Inside a child’s mouth, various bacteria are present. When you eat sticky or sugary foods, these bacteria change some of the sugars in foods to acids. Now the bacteria which are present in oral cavity join with these acids and form plaque. The plaque acids stick on the tooth substances and attack the outermost layer of the tooth called enamel.
• The acids then continue to attack the inside parts or your child’s tooth. This is what leads to toothache.

When your child complains of toothache, it may be because there was a cavity and then the infection reached all the way inside the tooth where the nerve endings are, hence causing the pain. Pain could be more if anything hot, cold or sweet touches it. The infection can then effect the development of adult teeth that are erupting. It can affect the developing teeth directly, thus causing decay to spread them as well. Or it can cause loss of the infected tooth and this leads to missing teeth in the child’s mouth earlier than they should. This is one of the cases for secondary or adult teeth erupting in the wrong place.

So an infected or caries tooth can lead to:
• Pain in the tooth or ear region
• A delayed reaction could also be swelling of the face on the side of infected tooth
• It can also spread infection through the body and make the child ill.

The above reasons make it imperative that decay of the tooth is detected early and treated.