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Posts for tag: Toothache

By Reno Laser Dentistry
April 11, 2012
Category: dental reno

Everyone has experienced a toothache in their lifetime. We all can relate, but can you always pinpoint exactly which tooth is causing the pain. Want to understand the pathway that pain travels when a toothache occurs?

According to an article at dentist.net, “a new study on toothaches”

“When it comes to a toothache, the brain doesn’t discriminate. A new imaging study shows that to the brain, a painful upper tooth feels a lot like a painful lower tooth. The results, which will be published in the journal Pain, help, explain why patients are notoriously bad at pinpointing a toothache.

For the most part, humans are exquisitely tuned to pain. The brain can immediately distinguish between a splinter in the index finger and a paper cut on the thumb, even though the digits are next-door neighbors. But in the mouth this can be more difficult, depending where and how intense the ache is.

“We don’t know much about tooth pain,” comments dentist and neuroscientist Alexandre DaSilva of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not part of the new research. The new study is one of the first to address the puzzle of toothache localization, he says.

In the study, researchers led by Clemens Forster of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany analyzed brain activity in healthy – and brave – volunteers as they experienced tooth pain. The researchers delivered short electrical pulses to either the upper left canine tooth (the pointy one) or the lower left canine tooth in the subjects. These bursts of electrical stimulation produced a painful sensation similar to that felt when biting into an ice cube, Forster says, and were tuned such that the subject always rated the pain to be about 60 percent, with 100 percent being the worst pain imaginable.

To see how the brain responds to pain emanating from different teeth, the researchers used fMRI to monitor changes in activity when the upper tooth or the lower tooth was zapped. “At the beginning, we expected a good difference, but that was not the case,” Forster says.

Many brain regions responded to top and bottom tooth pain – carried by signals from two distinct branches of a fiber called the trigeminal nerve – in the same way. The V2 branch carries pain signals from the upper jaw, and the V3 branch carries pain signals from the lower jaw.

DaSilva agrees that the brain’s inability to tell top-tooth pain from bottom-tooth pain “pairs really well with what we see in the clinic.”

Click here to read the entire article:

Are you suffering from a toothache need a dentist in the Reno area? Dr. McElhinney of Reno Laser Dentistry has more than 30 years of experience, you couldn’t ask for a better dentist. Click here to contact his office to set-up an appointment.

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By Reno Laser Dentistry
December 16, 2011
Category: dental

We all have been bothered by that annoying aching toothache. Some may even cringe just hearing the word. A toothache is pain that may occur in the teeth, jaw or gums. There are different types of toothaches which can determine the kind of oral health issue you may be experiencing. Regardless of the type of toothache you should be evaluated by a dental professional immediately. Once your dentist has diagnosed the type of toothache an antibiotic may be prescribed. Even though the infection is gone due to the antibiotics you were taking. However, the cause of the infection has not been eliminated and the infection will return in the future if you don’t follow the prescribed treatment. You could even have more bone damage from an infection or lose the tooth due to continued decay. Depending on the severity of the infection, a dental patient may undergo a root canal treatment or tooth extraction.

One issue patients may not fully understand is that if you choose not to follow-up with a dental professional an infection can lead to a more serious one called “systemic”, occurs when microorganisms spread throughout the body in the bloodstream. This is a serious matter especially for patients with a compromised immune system.

The good news is that due to advances in the dental industry patients simply have no need to endure unnecessary swelling, pain and suffering, and expenses by delaying the proper treatment. Contact Dr. McElhinney’s dental staff located in Reno with any concerns or questions you may have.

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