How Often Do People Get Extra Teeth?
As an oral surgeon, I want to share with you a question I often get asked, “Hey, I have an extra tooth. How often does that happen?” Well having an extra tooth or ‘supernumerary tooth’ is not that common, in fact it only happens about five percent of patients. The most common place that it happens is associated with wisdom teeth. In fact, I’ll sometimes nickname those the twins. During development of that wisdom tooth, it actually formed an extra tooth. It doesn’t mean anything wrong is going on, it doesn’t mean that you have extra things anywhere else in your body, it simply meant that that tooth had a twin and that when we consider removing your wisdom teeth we need to remove that extra tooth also because long term it’s not going to do us any good. The second most common place is in a position we call “Between your two front teeth.” It’s typically found in kids when they’re between four and seven years old. The reason why it’s found there is because it starts to affect how those front teeth come in or, as we start to go to a dentist, and get more regular x-rays, we can see it forming. That tooth actually has a name also, it’s called a mesiodens. We have to often remove that mesiodens, at that point because it can affect the spacing the position of and the development of those two front teeth because it’s just in the way. So hopefully you’ll understand that having an extra tooth isn’t a bad thing, it’s not extremely common but there are places where it’s more common than others and hopefully your dentists are looking at those places to help guide you on what to do you.