An elbow, a kick, a fall… there are all sorts of reasons why a patient may suffer trauma to the central incisors. Although it is advisable to go to your trusted dental practice after an accident of this kind, the truth is that many patients wait to see how the injured tooth develops, until they reach the point of needing whitening to solve the consequences of trauma to a central incisor.
The case we are presenting here is that of a young patient who had suffered trauma to a central incisor some time earlier. He came to Clínica Peydro concerned after noticing a change in the color of that tooth. After studying his case, we confirmed that the color change in his incisor was due to trauma that had injured the nerve, so that it gradually broke down until it lost its vitality. The nerve is the living part of the tooth, so when it becomes necrotic, that vital part turns into a lifeless substance that infects the tooth, and the products of that breakdown start to darken it.
Whitening to solve the consequences of trauma
The first step we took was to treat the infection in the nerve. To do that we carried out root canal treatment, which involves cleaning the inside of the root of the tooth, removing the degraded nerve and filling the space with a sealing material. After the root canal treatment, we carried out whitening to solve the consequences of the trauma. The aim was for the dark tooth to recover its original color, using the healthy central incisor as the shade to match.
The treatment plan in this case was to whiten the tooth from the inside, taking advantage of the nerve treatment. To do that, we changed the whitening product once a week, monitoring how the whitening progressed. Every patient is different, so the number of sessions varies too. We always need the color to be slightly whiter, because there is always a small loss of brightness in the days after the treatment ends. Generally, and whenever it is appropriate, at Clínica Peydro this is our procedure of choice, because it is completely conservative: the tooth structure stays intact, which is very important in young patients. When a patient takes a heavy blow or has a fall, as well as necrosis —as in this patient’s case— the tooth can also break. If you want to know what to do in that situation, you can read: Fractured front teeth in a child after a fall.
