Worn-down teeth can be rebuilt. Start with why they're wearing.

The signs patients notice

• Front teeth that look shorter than they used to
• Edges that appear thin, ragged, or translucent
• Flattened, shiny spots on the chewing surfaces
• New sensitivity to cold or sweets as enamel thins
• Small chips that keep appearing
• A bite that feels different — or a face that looks "shorter"

Wear is slow, which is what makes it dangerous: no single month looks different from the last, and by the time the mirror shows it, a lot of enamel is gone. Enamel doesn't grow back. What's lost is lost — which is why the evaluation is worth having when you first notice the signs, not years later.

Why the cause comes before the treatment

Tooth wear has three mechanisms, and they demand different responses:

Attrition — tooth grinding against tooth, usually at night. The fix involves managing the force: a properly designed guard, and restorations engineered for a heavy bite.

Erosion — acid softening enamel until it dissolves or wears at a touch. The acid has a source — diet, reflux, dry mouth — and until the source is managed, every restoration sits in the same acid bath the enamel did.

Abrasion — mechanical wear from outside the bite, classically aggressive brushing. The fix is technique, not dentistry.

Most worn mouths involve more than one mechanism — acid-softened enamel grinds away far faster than healthy enamel, so erosion and attrition compound each other. Reading which combination is at work, from the wear pattern itself, is the diagnostic step that determines everything after it. Our guide Why Are My Teeth Wearing Down? covers the four wear patterns in depth.

Restorations placed into an unsolved wear problem don't stop the wear. They join it.

How we evaluate a worn bite

A wear case gets a comprehensive evaluation, not a filling-by-filling estimate. That means photographs and imaging to document the current state; a wear-pattern analysis to read the mechanism; an acid history where erosion is suspected; and a bite evaluation — because years of wear often shift how the jaw closes, and severe cases lose actual bite height (bite collapse). When the muscles have adapted to a worn position, we may use a deprogrammer to find the jaw's true position before planning anything permanent: how that works. The result is a risk picture — how fast this mouth is wearing, and from what — using the framework in our risk assessment guide.

Treatment, matched to the damage

The pattern across all four: the amount of dentistry follows the amount of damage, and no restorative work begins until the cause is controlled. Where wear is one problem among several — failing older work, missing teeth, recurring fractures — the plan belongs inside a whole-mouth picture: complex restorative dentistry.

Who does this work

Wear and bite cases at MSD are planned jointly by Dr. Matthew Dillon and Dr. Shantall Di Loreto. Dr. Dillon is a general dentist with advanced continuing education in restorative, implant, and comprehensive dentistry, including training at the Kois Center — where much of modern wear and bite diagnosis was systematized — and a Mastership in the Academy of General Dentistry (MAGD). We're an independent, doctor-owned practice on N University Drive in Coral Springs, and we see adult patients from Parkland, Coconut Creek, Tamarac, Margate, and nearby North Broward communities for wear and bite evaluations.