Night Guards & Athletic Mouth Guards in San Diego

When you think of mouth guards, you may picture generic plastic trays that protect your teeth during sports. At Peak Dental, we do offer customized sports guards, but we can also use other special types of mouth guards to control teeth grinding, a condition also referred to as bruxism or bruxing.

Symptoms of Teeth Grinding

It’s normal to grind your teeth occasionally, especially in stressful situations. However, some people experience chronic teeth grinding (bruxism) that leads to painful symptoms like head and neck pain, the abnormal wearing of teeth, and temporomandibular joint dysfunction (usually abbreviated to either TMJ or TMD).

Are the uncomfortable symptoms of teeth grinding disrupting your life? If so, we encourage you to contact our San Diego dental office. In many cases, people grind their teeth during sleep without realizing it.

Using impressions of your teeth, we will create a customized night guard that is highly effective for reducing chronic teeth grinding and its symptoms. Depending on the severity of your grinding, we also have the option of using a device called an occlusal splint. This prevents your teeth from coming into contact with each other while you sleep.

Reasons for Teeth Grinding 

After a thorough examination, we can determine the probable cause of your teeth grinding. In general, chronic teeth grinding is often the result of:

• Injury or trauma to the temporomandibular joint
• Misaligned dental bite
• Muscle tension

A misaligned dental bite can result in too much force placed on one side of your mouth. In this case, you can’t bite down evenly on all teeth. This causes your jaw to shift out of its normal position to bring the rest of your teeth together. All this constant, excessive force on your teeth, jaw joint, and surrounding muscles ultimately leads to painful symptoms in your head and neck.

Protect Your Oral Health with Athletic Mouth Guards

Frequently, dental injuries are a consequence of playing sports. Estimates indicate that nearly 40% of dental trauma occurs during sports, and 80% of these injuries affect at least one of the front teeth. Knowing these statistics makes it easy to see how important it is to protect your family's teeth with a mouth guard during athletic activities. 

Since we use impressions of your teeth, our athletic mouth guards are much more effective than generic guards purchased over the counter. They’re also made of a much more rigid material, and the result is superior protection for you and your children.

Please Contact Our Office

If you’re bothered by teeth grinding or you need a high-quality sports guard to keep your family’s teeth safe and healthy, please call our San Diego dental office. Dr. Sara Jeffrey and our team look forward to helping you get the relief you need!