I get asked this a lot.
It’s probably a better question to ask “what’s the best age for orthodontic treatment?” Braces is a big part of the orthodontic treatments that I provide for many of my patients, particularly my teenage patients but it’s not the whole picture.
Last week I had a patient in with her mum and her mum told me several times that she thought her daughter was too young for braces. The patient was 13, a very typical age for braces but her mum had concluded that she didn’t need braces because she still had some of her baby teeth present.
She has a point, I don’t often put fixed braces on patients until they have most or all of their adult teeth. But if someone is at an age where they should have lost their baby teeth and had them replaced by all their adult teeth and this hasn't happened, then we need to find out if there is a problem and present some options for dealing with it. Most of the patients with problems like this girl would probably have benefitted coming to see me 6 years earlier.
For some problems, I’d like to see a patient long before they’re 13. The big ones are:
- crossbites (where there are upper teeth biting inside the lower teeth), particularly when they make the lower jaw move into the wrong position when they close their mouth (displacements)
- loss of baby teeth younger than expected (where we have to maintain the space for the developing adult teeth
- loss of adult teeth during dental development (this could be due to decay, abnormal formation or trauma)
- “bang” into each other)
- teeth developing off course (particularly the canine tooth in the upper jaw)
Some of these problems are obvious to the patients, some are obvious to the parents, some are only going to be picked up by a dental examination – either by an orthodontist or a family dentist. When they’re noticed then an early orthodontic intervention might save a lot of trouble later on…even if a patient still needs braces for other things.
For that reason, my advice (which is basically the same as the American Association of Orthodontists) is that every child should have an orthodontic examination by age 7 or earlier if you notice a problem before then.