Dentists concerned over tooth extractions from children

Dentists are extracting up to 20 baby teeth from children as young as two due to tooth severe decay, according to a leading dentist.

The Vice-President of the Irish Dental Council has said she has removed several teeth from young children on more than one ocassion.

Dr Catherine Gallagher, an oral surgeon at Cork University Dental School, said that while this was on the extreme end of the spectrum it was not an isolated occurrence.

“It is a daily thing for us to be taking out eight, nine, ten teeth from children who are five, six, seven years old. We’re doing a lot of extractions,” she told RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne.

“Overwhelmingly it’s dental decay. We do see some children who are needing front teeth taken out as a result of trauma… but they are in a very small minority.

“There are either so many teeth gone bad or the children are so young that they can’t sit in a dental chair and have treatment, or there are just too many teeth to take out that they end up needing a general anesthetic and multiple extractions,” she said.

Dr Gallagher said parents have usually “gone past the point of shock” but are very upset, adding that children having that amount of extractions is a “traumatic experience for everybody involved”.

‘Preventable problem’

She said the children are in pain afterwards and have difficulty eating and that it is an “unpleasant and almost entirely preventable problem”.

“We’re not good enough at prevention, we’re not good enough at helping people to understand why decay happens in the first place,” she said.

“Dental decay is almost entirely preventable… it is linked pretty much exclusively to how, when and how often we eat sugar.”

Dr Gallagher said that while toothbrushing is helpful, a person will “by and large” not get tooth decay if there is no sugar in their diet.

She explained that bacteria in the mouth live on sugar.

“When they have sugar they produce acid and the acid is what attacks our teeth and causes the decay,” she said.

“Our saliva over a period of half an hour or so when we’ve had sugar will get our mouths back to a healthy state where they’re not being attacked by acid.

“But if we keep adding sugar into that mouth, then the mouth never gets a chance to recover and we end up with dental decay. So it’s frequency as much as quantity that is a real problem.”

Dr Gallagher said many parents are “surprised” when their children have tooth decay because they do not realise that drinks can be as bad as sweets, adding that fruit juices often contain a lot of sugar.

She said children are upset following tooth extractions and it is “not the ideal environment” to be giving parents advice about sugar.

“Yes we can have those conversations but it’s the wrong place and time for them. They need to be happening much, much earlier, before this problem arises,” she said.

“Before children get teeth is the best time to prevent the problem. You have time to avoid developing the bad habits in the first place and it’s much easier not to acquire a bad habit than it is to change it and give it up.”