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Hi. This is Dr. Stram. I would like to discuss the need for teeth cleaning in small animals (dogs and cats).
Pet Teeth Cleaning may reduce long term pet health care costs.
At some point during these small animals’ lives, they usually will need to have their teeth cleaned in order to prevent severe dental disease. The worse the dental disease gets, the more it affects their health. Many pet geriatric diseases have their roots in poor veterinary dentistry.
Pet Teeth Cleaning may reduce dog bad breath.
I’m sure that many of you have experienced a dog coming up to you and breathing in your face or kissing you. You then smelled the dog’s really, really bad breath. That bad breath is due to the bacteria that build up in the dog’s mouth and on the teeth and under the gums. That’s one sign that (most likely) your animal’s teeth need to be cleaned at that point. There are also other reasons (as the teeth get worse) that you can get bacteria that actually make its way underneath the gums and down between the teeth and get into the bone and can become bloodborne. The bacteria can then settle in the heart or in the kidneys or in the liver or in the pancreas or in the other organs and could cause a systemic infection.
Annual Pet Teeth Cleaning may be needed as early as 3 years.
During your pet’s annual vaccination and wellness examination, we perform a dental examination. Usually dogs and cats will have pretty good teeth until they are 3 or 4 or 5 years old (depending upon how much they chew). At some point, however, you’ll start seeing a build-up. If you follow along (as I point to the chart that appears in this video), we can see a normal tooth, normal anatomy, healthy gums, and a nice-and-tight seal with a tooth root that is sealed into the bone.
As you move along in periodontal disease, you start to build up tartar on the tooth. You get a lot of inflammation along the gums. You then start to get inflammation within a “pocket” which starts to get a little bit of separation of that tooth.
As you go into the next stage, you are getting a lot of tartar that builds up around that tooth. This really causes a lot of inflammation. When the gum is inflamed, it starts to recede. As the gum recedes, the bone becomes more exposed. You get the root that starts breaking away from that bone. At that point, the tooth starts to get loose.
As you get further along, the diagram shows how the bone starts to fade away and degenerate due to the inflammation. At this point, these teeth are starting to get fairly loose. This is where you get a lot of bacteria that can finally make it through that protective barrier and into the bone and then into the bloodstream. This obviously causes problems.
Once we get fairly far along here (on the diagram), you’ve got a lot of pus. You got the chance that a bad tooth could abscess. You get loss of bone. At this point, these teeth (if the dogs do chew or if the cats do a lot of chewing) sometimes start to fall out or get very loose.
Pet Teeth Cleaning requires animal sedation.
Our procedure for cleaning teeth. These animals are not going to sit still when we place an ultrasonic scaler up against their enamel in order to try to blow away all of that tartar. These animals need to be under anesthesia. We set this up such that the pet comes in on the morning of its dental procedure (its dental cleaning). The pet comes in on an empty stomach. If the pet is under 5 years of age, we treat them a little bit differently than when they are a little bit older. We do more extensive pre-dental blood work. We may require a chest X-ray. For some of the older animals, we’d like to have them on IV fluids. Ultimately, we have the animals under anesthesia so that we can clean the tartar off the teeth.
We measure the gap that is forming between the gum and the healthy tissue down below (just like how it is done in human medicine). We get a measurement of that millimeter length. If it is getting too deep, we often recommend doing something to help that pocket reform and solidify against that tooth. If it is severe enough, we might recommend that the tooth be extracted so that the area can heal over, and we won’t have an area where bacteria can now enter the bloodstream anymore.
Pet Teeth Cleaning makes your dog or cat happier and healthier.
Most of the dogs act so much better after they have had their teeth cleaned because they’ve been putting up with the tartar and the swallowing of the bacteria and having a bad mouth for a long, long time. Once we get them cleaned up, they feel better. Their breath is better. Their overall health is improved.
One of the things that have been found during recent years with the studies that have been done is that if you can keep an animal’s teeth clean during the entire life of the pet, the animal usually lives almost two years longer than a littermate that would have its teeth left unchecked and unbrushed and unclean.
By keeping your pet’s teeth clean and getting geriatric checkups , you can actually add to the life expectancy of your pet.
Schedule Pet Teeth Cleaning at www.ElkGroveVet.com
YouTube Link
Youtube Title: Pet Teeth Cleaning ( Elk Grove Village IL, Schaumburg IL, Itasca IL)
Pet Teeth Cleaning may reduce dog bad breath and cat bad breath. Pet dentistry may reduce pet health care costs and improve geriatric pet health.
