The most common reason braces break is eating hard, crunchy or sticky food.
Wires connect all of the brackets and are the driving force in straightening your teeth. Wires often break due to the pressure placed on them for teeth straightening and from eating. If a wire breaks or protrudes, use a clean pencil eraser to push it into a comfortable position where it can't hurt your cheeks or gums.
Braces brackets or wires can become damaged or broken. This common inconvenience can quickly cause discomfort. Brackets, bands, spacers, and wires can break for several reasons, like eating hard or crunchy foods, sustaining a mouth injury, or even brushing your teeth too vigorously.
When a wire breaks in your braces, this isn't necessarily a dental emergency. If the wire isn't causing any discomfort, you can wait until regular office hours to have it fixed or replaced. However, you should get dental care as soon as you can if the broken wire causes discomfort.
Teeth Shifting Without Retainers
If you do not wear your retainer, the fibers in your gum tissue can pull your teeth back into the positions they were in before the braces or aligners forced them into the desirable places. The longer you go without wearing retainers, the more your teeth can shift.
Broken brackets, also known as loose or floating brackets, frequently occur during your time with braces and are something nearly every patient will experience.
There are definitely healthy foods that can break brackets. Biting into an apple, granola bars, nuts, carrots, corn-on-the-cob, chunky peanut butter, well-cooked steak or beef jerky, and chewy and/or toasted bagels can break brackets.
You may assume that because it's harder to remove food particles and plaque when you have braces that a stiff toothbrush is a good choice. However, braces are more delicate than you think, and a stiff-bristled brush can actually bend or break your braces.
O-Rings. O-rings are small rubber rings that hold the archwire to each bracket. Dr. Burkey and his staff place these by stretching the o-ring around the corners of each bracket, over the archwire.
During this time, there's plenty of opportunity to misplace your aligners or damage your wires and brackets. While your orthodontist will generally allow for the repair of breakages free of charge, there could be fees for broken brackets, wires, plates or lost aligners if damage or loss occurs frequently.
Appointment/wire changing intervals: every 6 to 7 weeks. Stage 3 (4 months): Reset brackets as needed. .0195 x . 025 NiTi > .
In an ideal world, braces shouldn't break. But anyone who has had a brace will know that the reality can be rather different. Breakages can cause problems if they happen often. Treatment times become very long and having to attend for emergency appointments can be inconvenient for families.
The teeth have the tendency to move places slowly even after the braces have straightened them out. The retainers are to keep that effect in place. The requirement to keep them on teeth depends on the age of the patient, but on average they can comfortably stay for 5 years.
In most cases, it will be pretty obvious to you that you're dealing with broken braces. You'll probably be able to see the issue just by looking at your mouth. Missing brackets, wires sticking in weird directions, bands hanging off the molars at the back of your mouth…
The main reason we tell patients to avoid sticky and chewy foods is to avoid damaging their braces. These types of foods can pull at the brackets and wires. Today's braces, however, are much stronger and more durable, so chewing certain types of gum most likely won't cause any damage.
Fizzy or Sugary Drinks
Take extra care with citrus fruits like oranges and grapefruits — these can cause staining and are not braces-friendly. Sugar content aside, fizzy drinks are also highly acidic which can cause tooth decay and erosion over time.
Foods That Are Good
Softer options are your way to go as your mouth gets used to braces, so eating food like chicken, oatmeal, rice, beans, fish, eggs and yogurt are great ways to get a lot of nutrition without breaking a bracket.
Also, the acidity of soda has the potential to weaken the bond your braces have with your teeth. This could result in an unexpected trip to your orthodontist to repair anything that might break or come unattached.
Foods that can be eaten with braces include: Bread – pre-cut loaves of bread, soft tacos and tortillas are safe options. Dairy – soft cheese, yoghurt and dips are fine to eat with braces. Grains– rice, noodles and all kinds of cooked pasta are soft and suitable for braces.
Whether you're sixteen or sixty years old, you can still get your teeth straightened with braces or clear aligners, in fact, age is just a number when it comes to orthodontic treatment. While your age will not affect the outcome of your treatment, it does have an impact on your treatment speed.
While a considerable number of children get braces between the ages of 12 and 14, plenty of kids don't begin orthodontic treatment until they're in their mid-to-late teens.
You may have recently seen news coverage of a man who sued his dentist after the orthodontist had him wearing braces for over a decade! The average orthodontic treatment plan is anywhere from 18 months to three years.