Dental care for pets is essential to lower the likelihood of gum disease. Untreated gum disease is five times more common in dogs than in humans and can cause cavities, gum issues, and tooth loss. As a pet owner, you must help your pet maintain regular dental hygiene.
What are the advantages of routine dental cleanings?
Here are some reasons to take your pet to a vet dentist annually and if you still dont have one for your pet, visit this link.
A comprehensive oral check can reveal surface problems that aren’t evident.
A veterinarian will examine your pet’s whole oral cavity for signs of disease or pathology. Dog teeth cleaning requires anesthesia to ensure the pet’s safety; with blinding lights and sharp instruments, no animal would willingly submit to the procedure. Anesthesia allows experts to examine regions an awake patient would never accept, such as under the tongue, in the back of the throat, and beneath the gums.
Dental X-rays may reveal disease hiding beneath the surface.
Half of every tooth sits beneath the gum like an iceberg due to its huge roots. Unseen by the human eye, 60 percent of oral health problems in pets reside beneath the gum line. By capturing dental X-rays of the entire mouth, experts can examine each tooth, root, pulp chamber, and surrounding bone and jaw. Dental X-rays enable the detection of unpleasant disorders such as a fractured crown or root, tooth or root resorption, dental infection, bone erosion, and cancer.
Without routine dental X-rays, pets with these invisible illnesses would suffer in silence. In time, the disease or degeneration would become apparent, but the outlook would be far worse by then. A tooth can be salvaged or pulled, the advancement of periodontal disease can be slowed, and cancer can be biopsied, removed, and treated if detected early by a veterinary surgeon.
Your pet’s teeth are polished and free of hazardous microorganisms.
The obvious benefits of a yearly dental cleaning are clean teeth and fresh breath, but the benefits extend under the surface to a tiny realm that we cannot see.
Plaque is created by salivary bacteria that build a biofilm on the tooth’s surface. This film becomes yellow-brown tartar as it ages, layer upon layer. Many owners note tartar’s likeness to stone or cave formations, which is accurate. The tartar hardens and cements itself to the tooth, needing a plier-like hand instrument to break it off. Although tartar appears inert, the bacterial population is constantly expanding and hiding in two harmful locations: below the gum line, where it produces periodontal disease, and in the bloodstream, where it distributes infection throughout the body and causes chronic inflammation of internal organs.
Dental cleaning restores your pet’s teeth to their natural whiteness, but it also greatly reduces the bacterial burden. To keep the bacterial count in line and prevent the infection from progressing to life-threatening heart and kidney damage levels, annual cleanings minimize or remove all infections.
Oral masses can be discovered and biopsied early on.
Bad breath is typically a symptom of periodontal disease, but your pet’s mouth may conceal something sinister, such as cancer. It is fairly uncommon to administer anesthesia to a patient for a regular dental operation, only to discover a big lump in the oral cavity. Populi, benign gingival tumors, are not metastatic but can grow fast, necessitating surgical excision and even extraction of adjacent teeth. Malignant tumors, such as sarcomas and carcinomas, which can aggressively invade soft oral tissues and penetrate the jaw bone, necessitating severe surgery and radiation, are significantly more ominous.
During your pet’s annual dental cleaning, a thorough examination of their oral cavity might detect any worrisome growths not seen during a standard checkup. These tumors can then be biopsied for diagnosis. Surgical excision and treatment can begin as soon as possible, possibly before cancer has progressed to the bone if they are cancerous.
The Takeaway
As with humans, adding tooth brushing into your dog’s daily routine will help prevent the accumulation of bacteria in their mouth. If you are unaware of how to clean your dog’s teeth, your local veterinarian can demonstrate and recommend items. Introduce your pet to dental cleanings as early as possible, especially as a puppy, to get them used to the brushing motion.
