Simple Mouth Protection Key to Preventing Injuries for Those Who Play Sports

She had only a few hours before her dinner party, but Jeanne Lucier wanted to get in some in-line skating.

Feeling a bit rushed, she didn’t put on her usual protective equipment.

The trouble started when she rolled onto a freshly laid section of asphalt.

“It was sticky. I stopped. I was thrown forward. I knew to brace myself, but my lower jaw hit and scraped along the asphalt,” Lucier recalled. “I had a capped tooth fall off, and I had a huge abrasion on my face.”

The 48-year-old Green Bay, Wis., woman counts herself lucky, even though she had to make an emergency trip to a dentist and had to let her best friend throw the dinner party in her stead, at the friend’s house. “I stayed home under a warm quilt and felt sorry for myself,” Lucier said.

After several dental visits, including that emergency trip four years ago, Lucier has gained a new capped tooth to replace the one lost forever in the asphalt--and a new understanding of the need for face protection, including a mouth guard, in sports.

Lucier is especially appreciative of mouth guards. “I am so fearful of further accidents that I wouldn’t think of leaving the house without it,” she said.

The attention to mouth protection is something that dentists are trying to encourage, especially as people spring into the seasonal increase in outdoor activity.

“Not enough people are getting the message, from everything from bike riding, believe it or not, to contact sports,” said Richard H. Price, an American Dental Association spokesman with a dental practice in Newton, Mass. “Mouth guards virtually eliminate injuries.”

There are no comprehensive national data on overall mouth injuries. But the Consumer Product Safety Commission does track a wide range of product-related injuries that come to hospital emergency rooms. CPSC reported 20,184 visits to hospital emergency rooms because of mouth injuries related to bike use alone in 1998. The CPSC’s injury database also reported 8,249 visits due to mouth injuries related to baseball.

“Most of the athletes that we see with these types of injuries are teenagers who have finished a course of orthodontics, and their teeth are nice and straight, and they go out and lose a tooth,” said Bill Nelson, an oral surgeon in Green Bay.

A tooth that is recovered and kept moist in water or milk until it and the athlete can be reunited in the dentist’s chair has about a 50-50 chance of taking new hold in the jaw under optimal conditions, Nelson said. Those conditions include getting to the dentist’s office in no more than 40 minutes, he said.

The cost of fixing the damage, not to mention the additional dental visits required, can create much gnashing of remaining teeth on the part of the athletes and their parents. Total costs, including emergency room treatment and dental follow-up that might include crowns and a root canal, can run more than $2,000, Nelson said.

Mouth guards absorb some impact from a blow. And, by letting the teeth clamp, they also hold the jaw in place, spreading the force of the impact beyond the teeth, Price said. That’s important because teeth are more fragile than people might think, he said.

And this could be prevented by a small device available for a few dollars at a sporting goods store.

There are various types of mouth guards, ranging from ones custom-fitted in a dentist’s office to ones bought off the rack at the store. Although the custom jobs are said to fit better, they cost more. For those who want to minimize costs, “any mouth guard the athlete feels comfortable wearing is effective, in my opinion,” Nelson said.

But the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons says the total rehabilitation cost for a single knocked-out tooth is more than 20 times the cost of a custom mouth guard. The group has named April as its National Facial Protection Month.