The American Dental Association estimates that athletes who don’t wear mouthguards are sixty times more likely to suffer dental injury than those who do.
The use of a mouth guard can prevent more than 200,000 injuries to the mouth each year. That’s why I highly recommend mouth guards for my pediatric dentistry patients.
Over 25 percent of dental injuries we treat in our Upper East Side children’s dentistry practice are sports-related. And the majority of these involve the top front teeth.
Dental mouth guards typically cover the upper teeth and also protect the soft tissues of the tongue, lips and cheek lining.
I consider wearing a mouth guard mandatory in contact and collision sports including:
Football
Lacrosse
Boxing
Wrestling
Basketball
Hockey
Soccer
A mouth guard can also prevent injury in non-contact sports, such as bicycling, skating, skateboarding and gymnastics. Hits to the face in those sports may be accidental, but they are just as damaging.
How prevalent are sports-related dental injuries? In 2012, the National Youth Sports Safety Foundation forecast that more than three million teeth would be knocked out in youth sporting events that year!