Using Mouth Guards with Braces and Aligners in Athletic Patients

When it comes to orthodontics, making sure you’ve considered the patient’s unique requirements is highly important to provide a reliable and effective treatment plan.
As part of this, looking at whether or not the patient is athletic and engaged in regular sports is highly important; after all, many athletic patients use mouth guards, but these can actually compromise the success of a treatment plan if not accounted for.
Should Patients Wear Mouth Guards with Braces or Clear Aligners?
Mouth guards are generally a requirement for most sporting activities nowadays for liabilities. As such, if you have an athletic patient in need of braces or aligners, it’s crucial to consider how these will work alongside a mouth guard.
Generally speaking, if your patient regularly engages in contact sports or wears a mouth guard, braces will be much more likely to get knocked off. However, there are ways around this – and this can actually be very important, as the consequences of face injuries while wearing braces can sometimes be severe.
Which Mouth Guards Can Patients Use with Braces or Aligners
If you have an athletic patient who needs to use a mouth guard, they could use one of the following two options:
– Specialist braces / clear aligner mouth guards are designed with braces and aligners in mind. These generally aren’t as snug as a custom set of mouth guards, but they can provide some additional protection and reduce the risk of injury. These are available from places such as Amazon or Dicks Sporting Goods.
– Boil and bite mouth guards can be altered regularly alongside the treatment simply by reboiling and readjusting the shape of the mouth guard. Since these can be modified as the teeth change, they work well alongside aligners and braces – but try to find one that can be remodified several times over to reduce the cost involved.
Both options can work well for braces and clear aligner patients. However, custom mouth guards are generally not advisable since the braces or aligners will continually alter the teeth; the patient would require a new custom aligner very often (potentially weekly). This could cost hundreds for each custom mouth guard, so an alternative may be more affordable.