Famous Actress Reveals Her Occlusal Nightmare: Stress

As dentists, you know the impact stress can have on teeth. It can lead to bruxism, malocclusion, and tooth loss. Most people, though, do not understand that stress can create real, permanent damage to the body. As one of many celebrities with false teeth, Demi Moore took the stage on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to emphasize that no one is immune to these effects. She shared a picture that shows one of her two missing front teeth.

"I sheared off my front teeth. I'd love to say it was skateboarding or something really kind of cool, but I think I think it's something that's important to share, because I think it's literally, probably after heart disease, one of the biggest killers in in America, which is stress. Stress sheared off my front teeth.”

Moore also spoke about this on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2010 where she specifically pointed to her “bad bite” and “clenching her teeth” as the culprits for her tooth loss.

"Thank God for modern dentistry. I had a bad bite and knocked my own front tooth out, which basically fell out into my hand, and I just thought my warranty was up. That was it. I called out and said, 'Baby, my tooth has fallen out of my head.'" At the time, Moore was clenching her teeth and was "a little too tense" in retrospect.

Modern dentistry provides dentists with digital tools that provide more information than using traditional methods. For dental occlusal analysis, the subjective methods include articulation paper, asking the patient how their bite feels, and others.

T-Scan is a tool that offers objective data that can be used to analyze the bite to determine how the teeth are coming together. If Demi's dentist used T-Scan, her tooth loss probably could've been avoided. Below is a side-by-side comparison of the details articulating paper provides versus the details T-Scan provides.

The marks left by articulating paper show points of contact, but the T-Scan shows how much pressure is exerted in each point of contact. This data is shown in real-time and can be played back for analysis. Dentists have found that they have much better conversations about treatment and have more confidence to move forward with reconstruction after seeing exactly what is going on in their bite.