WILL I NEED TO WEAR A RETAINER AFTER MY TREATMENT TO PREVENT MY TEETH FROM MOVING AGAIN?
WILL I NEED TO WEAR A RETAINER AFTER MY TREATMENT TO PREVENT MY TEETH FROM MOVING AGAIN?
RETENTION From DIGITAL ORTHODONTICS - Solo Edition by Dr. Bak Nguyen
Absolutely. Your teeth are now aligned but your body will keep growing. The lower jaw will keep growing through the years to push your lower front teeth to shift and to collapse, resulting in crowding. That's normal and will happen to everyone.
Let me explain why this phenomenon happens and why it is perfectly natural. The cartilage of your body will grow. Younger, this is how you grew. In adulthood, most of your cartilages have changed into hard bone and will stop growing. On your face, there are still 3 points of cartilage that will keep growing with time: the ears, the nose, and the chin.
Look at anyone, through time, these are the features that keep growing. It's normal, it's human. Actually, the chin is hard bone, the fact that you see it advancing (growing) is because of the other end of that bone, the condyles. At the level of the condyles, there is cartilage that will keep growing through the years.
Younger, that was how we all grew. Look at an average kid, you will see that his or her chin is way behind his or her upper jaw. With the years, the lower jaw is catching up. Well, at an adult age, the same phenomenon continues, only at a much slower rate. This example excludes the kids with class 3 protrusive jaw. But even then, you can see that the lower jaw is growing through time.
So growing older, your lower jaw will advance, causing the lower front teeth to collapse with the back of the upper front teeth. To compensate, your lower front teeth will start shifting and collapsing, resulting in crowding.
As this happens, the upper front teeth will slowly match the crowding of the lower front teeth. That is due to the balance of the forces between the lips pushing your teeth back and the tongue pushing them forward until the teeth find support one on another.
In other words, your lower jaw will always be moving forward for as long as you are alive. As you are getting older, the rate of that growth decrease, allowing us the time to compensate and to prevent the anterior crowding.
Every 4-5 years, you will have to see your attending to verify the pressure built-up into your front teeth and release that pressure. No worries, it is a simple matter of getting a sand band to loosen your contacts and to proceed to a new scan to make your next pairs of night retentions. That process will have to be repeated every 4-5 years to compensate for the growth of your lower jaw.
All orthodontic treatments, braces or aligners are temporary. To keep the alignment, you need maintenance, which is night retention for as long as you'll be alive. Retention is for life! The appliance won't last for life though, you will have to have them replaced.