Smokers are more likely to get dentures than nonsmokers. Smoking triples your risk for tooth loss, including the loss of all your teeth. Quitting smoking can help preserve your teeth. You might think that now that you have lost your teeth, there’s no reason to quit, but that’s not true. Smoking can make life harder for people with dentures. Here are four reasons why quitting smoking is good for denture wearers.
Better Healing
One of the negative impacts of smoking is that it delays your healing. After tooth extraction, your mouth may be significantly uncomfortable. If you want to shrink the period of discomfort and speed your healing, you should quit smoking.
In addition, smoking can increase your risk of complications like dry socket and infection. Sometimes, infection can be serious, which may not only prolong healing and increase discomfort, it can lead to serious health harms.
Even if you’re not prepared to quit completely, quitting for a short time around the extraction and recovery can help.
Implants More Successful
If you are considering implant dentures, you should work harder to quit. Implant dentures are a great investment: they can improve your appearance, the function of your dentures, and even your quality of life. However, you want to do what you can to protect that investment, and one of those things is quitting smoking. Smoking can increase your risk of dental implant failure by 2-3 times. Some studies show that smokers have a dental implant survival rate of under 90%.
Dental implants can be for life, if you take proper care of them, so there is more incentive to quit smoking for good. However, even quitting around the time of your surgery can be helpful.
Avoid Staining
Like natural teeth, dentures are vulnerable to staining by cigarette smoke. Unlike natural teeth, though, they don’t respond well to whitening. There are ways to clean dentures to try to remove staining, but it doesn’t always work to remove stains.
If you are a smoker and want to reduce staining from cigarettes, get denture teeth that are ceramic and can repel more of the stains than acrylic teeth.
Improve Comfort
Another impact of smoking is that it tends to decrease your saliva. Dry mouth is always a nuisance for smokers, but it’s worse when you wear dentures.
Dentures sit on your gums, which are not sturdy tissues to support biting and chewing. Saliva cushions and lubricates the dentures to help reduce discomfort. And it helps condition the gums, too, helping them stay healthy and less irritated.
Smokers are more likely to report discomfort from dentures than nonsmokers.
Better Living with Better Dentures
If you decide not to quit smoking when you get dentures, higher quality dentures can help you make the best of the situation. The superb fit of FOY ® Dentures can reduce discomfort and provide stability that may not be as good as dental implants, but is much better than traditional dentures. In addition, the high-quality materials can resist staining, so your dentures stay more attractive for longer.
To learn whether FOY ® Dentures are right for you, please call (803) 781-9090 today for an appointment with Columbia, SC denture dentist Dr. Adam Hahn at Smile Columbia Dentistry.