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Dentistry

Pet Dental Care & Animal Dentistry Services

Your Pet’s Breath Could be Telling You Something

Sometimes, keeping your pet's chompers healthy can feel like big job. Luckily, our practice provides comprehensive veterinary dentistry services. This includes routine care such as cleaning, along with treating more complicated procedures such as extractions. 

Dental care is extremely important to your pet’s oral health and overall health. Statistics show that dental disease affects nearly 80% of pets over 3 years old. Dental disease that is left undiscovered can cause serious health problems and infections that spread through a tooth root to the bloodstream that can then lead to organ damage. If your pet is having difficulty eating, abnormal odor coming from the mouth, unusual drooling, or soreness in the mouth, he or she may need to come in for a dental exam to determine if there are any issues. Regular dental screenings and dental care can prevent and treat poor dental health.

Pet Dental Exams

Our veterinarians take the time to thoroughly inspect your pet’s teeth, gums, and oral cavity with each wellness exam. We recommend that pets receive wellness exams annually through the age of 7, and then semi-annually for senior pets.

Your veterinarian will evaluate your pet’s health and determine a treatment plan. For healthy mouths, we offer dental chews and treats available for purchase. If your pet’s mouth shows signs of gingivitis and built up tartar, your veterinarian may recommend a professional teeth cleaning.

Because our pets don’t brush their teeth every night before bed like we do, tartar can firmly adhere to the teeth.

In order to remove this tartar, we perform dental scaling, our most basic dental procedure. During the scaling process our practice uses sonic and ultrasonic power scalers as well as hand held instruments to remove this tartar from the surface of the teeth both above and below the gum line.

Tooth extraction is another very common procedure. It is the goal of our practice for your pet to retain as many teeth as possible. However, sometimes extraction is the only option to relieve pain or ensure that periodontal disease does not advance. If not extracted, many times a diseased tooth can compromise the surrounding tissue and neighboring teeth. If caught early, there are more treatment options available for periodontal disease.

Our practice requires anesthesia for dental procedures. Because of this, we first perform a full physical exam and blood tests. We closely monitor your pet the entire time they receive anesthesia.Our practice keeps an eye on oxygen saturation and carbon dioxide levels in their blood along with their blood pressure, heart rate and temperature.

In order to help maintain the health of your pet’s mouth and teeth, you should bring your pet in for a dental check-up once a year. During these routine exams, our practice includes a general dental exam as well as teeth and gum cleaning if needed.

Catching dental problems in the early stages can greatly help your pet in the long run. Contact our practice right away if your pet experiences any of the following:

  • Chronic bad breath
  • Your pet shies away when you try to touch their mouth area
  • Excessive drool
  • Dropping food when eating
  • Bleeding in your pet’s mouth
  • Loss of appetite or weight loss
  • Yellowish brown crust of tartar around the gum line
  • Missing, loose or broken teeth

Dental Radiographs

Dental radiographs are an invaluable diagnostic tool available to help our veterinarians assess the overall health of your pet’s mouth. They allow our veterinarians to visually examine the internal anatomy of the teeth as well as disease below the gum line, including tooth roots and their surrounding bone. In fact, 60 percent of dental disease occurs below the gum line and can’t be seen to the ‘naked’ eye. This is what makes dental radiographs so necessary and invaluable. Taking dental radiographs requires that the patient is anesthetized or sedated and is usually done as part of a dental cleaning, especially when extractions are needed.

Indications

There are a number of reasons to take dental radiographs. Anything out of the normal warrants a radiograph to make sure we are not missing a problem. Some of these indications include missing teeth, fractured teeth, evaluating vitality of teeth, painful or sensitive teeth, nasal discharge, pre and post extraction, and more.

Please contact our office for further information or to schedule an appointment: (312) 583-1921

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