Teeth Chipping?

I ran my fingernail between my two front teeth, and a small piece of my tooth enamel fell off from the front of my tooth, enough to see the darker center of the tooth and leave a jagged edge at the bottom. I had braces as a child to correct an underbite. Now at 40 yrs old, my front teeth sit directly on top of each other. The top 2 are chipped along the bottom and behind the teeth leaving a thin enamel at the front. I wear a night guard for grinding, and my teeth are naturally yellow. Options?

Doctor Answers 1

Chipped teeth end to end

A bonded filling will solve your immediate problem of the chip. The cause is obviously your end to end bite. The occlusal guard is a help but my experience is that eventually you need to do something more definitive for your bite, otherwise you will continue to wear your teeth. They will erupt as they wear so your teeth will get shorter and you will show more gum. Crowns, veneers, or better yet braces followed by restorations would be possible solutions. If you don't do crowns or veneers you would have to do tooth whitening, sometimes called bleaching, which works really well on yellow teeth. Talk to your dentist. Maybe you would be able to use Clearcorrect or Invisalgn and use the trays to whiten your teeth. 

Littleton Dentist
