Fig.1	Fig.2	Fig.3
Fig.4	Fig.5	Fig.6

Dental Education Lecture: Early Braces Part II

In last lecture we show you a case of overbite.  To prevent possible tooth trauma, we start early braces.  The advantage of early braces is that the treatment is finished quicker, 6-9 months, as compared to 2-3 years for late braces.

Today we are going to show you another case of early braces to fix underbite (Fig.1-3).  In contrast to overbite, the underbite upper teeth (arrows in Fig.2) are behind the lower teeth .  One of the underbite tooth (black arrow in Fig.2) is so behind that you can hardly see it in the front (Fig.1).  Normally our upper teeth are outside of lower counterparts.  Underbite messes up our upper and lower jaw relationship.  The upper teeth cannot move forward normally.  They may push the bottom teeth abnormally forward. Therefore, we need start orthodontic treatment as soon as the problem arises.  Fig.3 shows misalignment of the bottom teeth.

We finish active treatment (the early braces) in 9 months (Fig.4 front view, Fig.5 upper bite view, Fig.6 lower bite view). After treatment, we make a special retainer and cement it in the mouth.  The retainer will be removed when all of remaining baby teeth are gone and adult successors come in.  Then the doctor will re-evaluate the child to determine whether phase two orthodontic treatment is necessary or not.  The retainer for phase one looks differnt from that for phase two.  Xin Wei, DDS, PhD, MS 1st edition 01/31/2009, last revision 02/09/2019