Eli5- How does having braces/losing teeth change your jaw shape

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Yeah having braces makes your teeth straighter but sometimes their entire lower jaw structure changes

And when people lose teeth their jaw seems to deteriorate e.g. old people with little to no teeth

In: Biology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your teeth are embedded into the bone; braces literally change the shape of your teeth and this, by extension, affects your jaw. When you *lose* teeth, the bone around the tooth’s root slowly disintegrates.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Bone is reactive to use within the human body. The more you use some parts, the stronger it makes itself, the less you use it, the more your body will reabsorb the bone to put the resources somewhere else. With teeth, the movement of the tooth caused by braces will slowly changes how the force is transferred to the bone in the jaw, which changes the bone growth.

This is also very common with hip implants, where the bone to the sides of the ‘spike’ part (that gets put into the thigh bone) will start to degrade, because of how much of the body weight gets transfered straight down the implant, which causes additional breaks->falls or other weakening