Discovering a bony jaw growth can be alarming. If you've had one diagnosed by a dentist, you know by now that they're not dangerous. However, they can still be annoying and irritating to have. While removing a bony growth is possible, it will simply come back if the root cause isn't treated. Worse yet, if you have these bony growths, there's a strong likelihood that your child will develop them, too. Keep reading to discover what these growths are, how they form, and what you can do to protect your child from developing them.

What Bony Growths Are

The bony growths in question here are actually called exostosis. It's a condition where the body builds more bone cells that are necessary, which ultimately build up to the point that they form a growth on the existing bone of your jaw. The good news is, bone growths like these are completely benign and you aren't in any danger from them.

What Causes Them

Exostosis bony growths are caused by an excess of pressure being put on a jaw in the area of the growth. Maybe you've noticed that the growth has popped up in an area where you typically grind your teeth together, or maybe you've had jaw aches in that area before. Chances are that this is why you have the bony growth.

When you repeatedly grind your jaw in the same place, it can cause a malfunction of sorts of the natural bone cell process. You need pressure on your jaw bone in order to keep it strong and building new cells. However, if you grind in one area in particular day in and day out, the jaw can respond by building too many bone cells, causing exostosis. This is why removing the bony growths will only allow more to grow in the future.

To complicate matters further, children often inherit the health and shape of their jaws from their parents. If your child doesn't have bony growths yet, they could easily develop them in the future once their jaw is finished growing.

Braces

If you want to get rid of your bony growths for good, the thing to beat them is braces. Braces for kids completely reshape the way your teeth work, allowing you to take pressure off of areas that have too much of it. While braces can't stop you from grinding your teeth, they can help to fix certain problems that lead to too much tooth grinding. For example, if your teeth are poorly aligned, when your jaw is naturally at rest, you may be grinding two teeth together. These teeth need to be moved back in line with the others so your jaw muscles can rest while distributing pressure evenly across all your teeth.

If the person with these bony growths is lucky enough to still be a kid, braces can fix this problem now better than when they're an adult. Since a child's jaw is still growing, braces can be used to guide that growth and change how the alignment of the jaw develops easily. If your child is developing bony growths or you have them and don't want your child to get them, sign up for braces now while your child is still a child.

Braces can potentially fix and prevent bony growths from coming back. If you want to get rid of yours or prevent your child from getting them at all, talk to your dentist about dental bite realignment with braces.

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