According to the National Sleep Foundation, over 18 million Americans suffer from sleep apnea, a condition that causes interrupted breathing during sleep. Those with sleep apnea may wake up hundreds of times a night when their airway becomes obstructed. As a result, they spend little time in deep, restorative sleep and often feel tired and drained during the day.

Most doctors first suggest continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) for sleep apnea patients, but this treatment requires the patient to strap a sleep pressure mask over their nose before sleep. Many patients have trouble sleeping with the mask or don’t like the feel of the straps on their face. A second and well-regarded treatment for mild to moderate sleep apnea is oral appliance therapy (OAT). This is a small, plastic device kind of looks like the mouth guards football players use.

An OAT gently pushes the jaw forward. Even this small adjustment helps keep a sleeper’s airway open, allowing them to get a good night’s sleep.  

Can You Use a Crown and Space Maintainer Together?

Let’s say that you have a young patient who requires a stainless steel crown  – and needs to maintain arch length after the premature loss of a primary tooth. How do you address both issues? The easiest solution is to use a fixed crown and loop appliance offered by SML dental labs.

Our appliance consists of a crown fused to a space maintainer loop. To prevent the molar from tipping, the space maintainer generally has a rest that seats on the adjacent tooth.

If you find that you need to move a patient’s tooth labially, your first thought might be to use a micro-screw.   Not your only option!

The Recurved Finger Spring is a great alternative to a micro-screw. It can be designed to help push a tooth forward so that it lines up evenly with the rest of the teeth – and can also be fabricated to correct minor rotations.

You can easily activate the springs. Just use a pair of 139 Bird-Beak pliers to pull forward on the spring’s arm.  If the tooth in question is decidedly vertical, you’ll want to leave the acrylic over the top of the finger spring. If the lingual incline of the tooth is shallow, then you can place the composite ledge on the tooth’s lingual.

As a periodontist, you are on the forefront of fighting gum disease. Since gum disease is the leading cause of tooth loss, you more than any other type of dentist, fight to save your patients’ beautiful smiles. In cases where saving teeth isn’t possible, you use your knowledge and skill to place implants so a patient can smile with confidence.

Part of building your new practice includes stocking up on the right supplies so you’ll always be ready no matter what patient walks through your door or what unforeseen complication arises. At Space Maintainers Laboratories, we want to be your periodontal appliance provider. Our worldwide network of dental laboratories means you can get the supplies you need quickly and reliably and at an affordable price.

Are you famous for misplacing your keys? Forgetting birthdays? Do you struggle to remember names or even the emails you read the day before? How are you sleeping these days? If you suspect that you have sleep apnea, it just might be stealing your memory!

Every single moment of your waking day, stimuli is pours into your mind. At night, your sleeping mind catalogues and consolidates these memories, essentially anchoring the more important ones in your mind so you can remember them in the morning.

If you have sleep apnea, you could be waking up hundreds of times a night and never entering into the important REM and slow-wave sleep cycles that are necessary for filtering and consolidating memories.

It can be difficult for dentists and orthodontists to perform dental procedures on young patients. Children already have a tendency to squirm or quickly grow restless, and that’s before you start putting anything into their mouths. The faster a dentist can complete a procedure, the less stress a young patient will endure, and the better the experience will be for all! If you need to place crowns in the mouth of a pediatric patient, consider our special pediatric strip crowns.

Specially made to be easily trimmed and filled with composite, they are also thin and offer superior anatomy strips.  No collars to cut or seams to split. Minimal chair time and maximum effectiveness! Parents will love these pediatric strip crowns...and their price as well.

At Space Maintainers Laboratories we offer pediatric strip crowns  

In your waking hours you do a lot to take care of your teeth. You brush twice a day, floss, and even swig some mouthwash from time to time. You also visit your friendly neighborhood dentist regularly. With all this healthy tooth investment, why are your teeth worn down, ragged looking, and painful when you wake up in the morning?

You might just be unknowingly destroying your teeth while you sleep. Nighttime teeth grinding (also known as bruxism) is more common than you might think, and it can lead to long-term damage -- wearing down your enamel, causing jaw pain and headaches, and even cracking your teeth!

Similar to a sports mouth guard, a sleep night guard fits over your teeth to protect against damaging force caused by clenching and grinding. If you suspect that you are grinding your teeth at night, visit your dentist to be fitted for a sleep night guard…or just to find out more.  

Features and Benefits:
 

  ►  Minimum Chair Time Required

  ►  Wire Placed in Correct Position

  ►  Simple & Effective

​  ►  Light-Cured with Composite

Patients lose, break or forget to use their retainers. Improve Final Retention outcome with EZ-Bond. Your patients will love it.

• Undetectable Appliance: Appliance is bonded individually to the lingual surface of each tooth.

    

When you think of children wearing crowns, chances are the image in your head is that of your daughter playing her favorite Disney princess or the gaggle of children that show up on your doorstep each Halloween. The other type of crown – the kind for your teeth – is something that you’ve probably reserved for viewing in the adult world.

Yet, in some rare cases, children do suffer from excessive tooth decay or even chip or break their molars (back teeth) as a result of a bad fall or accident. Although these teeth will eventually fall out naturally, your child still needs to use them in the meantime.

Teeth damaged in such a manner may require “Pedo Crowns. 

A missing tooth not only makes it more difficult for an individual to eat and speak, it can also cause embarrassment and affect self-esteem. This is why a bridge can be such an important tool for cosmetic dentists. Creating a bridge for a client can give them back a beautiful smile and help them eat and speak without pain or embarrassment.

Dentists have several choices when it comes to choosing material for a bridge, including metal-based bridges and all ceramic bridges. Another popular option is a zirconia bridge. This type of bridge is made from Zirconium oxide, a form of dental ceramic prized for its durability and toughness. Another big benefit of a zirconia bridge is that it is biocompatible, meaning the human body won’t reject it.