You may have seen braces as one of the quintessential rites of passage of the late teens. And,   even if you didn’t have them yourself, everyone had a few classmates who did. If you look around classrooms today braces would only be noticeable by their seeming absence. But with more people than ever engaging in orthodontic treatment, there would appear to be a disconnect. We reveal the cause of the mystery with Invisalign in Glasgow.

Why are clear aligners growing in popularity?

There is now a very different way of providing orthodontic treatment with the use of invisible aligners at our practice, Smile Dental Care Glasgow. As new ideas often have friction and hurdles to overcome, we feel aligners have proven themselves in a clinical setting; they seem to be going through a period of exponential growth.

Aligners use a series of clear plastic forms to progressively move teeth. Each aligner in the series is akin to a brace adjustment during traditional treatment. This means the entire treatment procedure is pre-planned and packed into the shape of the aligner, which minimises unnecessary trips to clinics and streamlines the process.

Treatment with braces vs aligners

Aligners provide many of the advantages that come with braces, with a lot less of the drawbacks that plagued your average brace user.

Apart from the obvious advantage of the clear plastic aligners being hard to spot in public and therefore providing a degree of privacy when it comes to treatment, the convenience of being able to remove and replace aligners cannot be understated. It allows our patients to take out their aligners before meals and after a quick rinse and brush refit them. This is trivial compared to the washing and cleaning routines that came along with wire braces after every meal. Nooks, crannies and brackets have to be cleaned around and checked for trapped food particles. Braces do result in a significant risk of cavity formation due to the limitations imposed on oral hygiene, which is a non-issue with clear aligners.

The role of new techniques and equipment

What stopped clear aligners like Invisalign in Glasgow from becoming mainstream in clinics was a series of technical hurdles. The idea of using plastic shields to move teeth was explored with dental splint research in the 1970s. Each of the aligners has to be individually created for the patient and that creates an awful lot of design and manufacturing work.

Being able to produce unique items is extremely costly but using computer-aided design techniques and simulating the treatment process digitally, and then using that to infer the necessary geometry of the aligners, has been a massive step forwards and one of the first examples of AI-driven dental care.

This process is ongoing and one of the newest additions is replacing an early step in the aligner design, where dental moulds were taken and the patients’ mouths were scanned using a 3D-scanner to create a high-fidelity model. The use of intraoral scanners to directly scan your teeth reduces the number of steps whilst improving model quality.

If you’re curious how Invisalign in Glasgow could help you, please feel free to get in contact with our clinic.