Why are we grinding our teeth so much?

Some dentists are reporting that we are grinding our teeth more, as stress and even fears over the recession grip us. What's wrong with us?

Dentists often call it bruxism. To the layman it is "teeth grinding", although it may only be clenching rather than grinding.
A lot of it happens at night, but there can be clenching during the day.

Some people may suffer headaches as a result, or shooting pains in their jaw. But many may not realize they are doing it until the dentist spots it.
Dentists look for particular patterns of wear, which can involve flaking of the enamel, although in more serious cases the "cusps" at the corners of molars may snap off, or they may be a total fracture of a tooth.
Often, irate sleeping partners are the first to discover the activity. It is not a pleasant thing to be woken by.
"It is the most horrendous noise," says dentist Andre Hedger, who has a practice near Gatwick airport, and saw a 20% rise in cases in 2008 and 2009. "It is like a concrete mixer running down a blackboard."
A full explanation for why we grind our teeth is yet to be established, but it is believed that stress and anxiety are at least exacerbating factors.

"Often the reason they are doing the grinding or clenching is stress, the recession", says Dr Hedger. "We have never seen so many stressed patients. They all say things have changed in the workplace - they are working longer hours."

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A paucity of studies means it is not easy to establish the numbers of sufferers in the UK. The advisers who man the helpline at the British Dental Health Foundation anecdotally report an increase in calls. And an unscientific straw poll by the British Dental Association identifies a number of dentists who think it is on the rise.
One reports: "I have definitely seen a huge interest in grinding-related problems since the start of the recession… I would say that I am probably seeing about five times as many cases as usual."
Another suggests: "We have seen a lot of grinding and clenching of late. Because grinding can take a long time to show up as tooth wear it would be difficult to say that clinically obvious examples have started within the last twelve months or so."

Yet another notes: "Whilst I haven't noted a particular increase of signs and symptoms associated with para functional [not to do with normal actions] clenching and grinding during the period of the recession, this is generally a phenomenon that is slowly increasing in prevalence."

Colchester dentist Francois Roussouw has noted a marked rise in people suffering the effects of teethgrinding.


"Over the last six-to-nine months there has been a 30% increase," he says.
"We see fracturing teeth without any decay being present. People who fractured a healthy tooth in the past - that was very rare. In the past two months I've seen three patients where a perfectly healthy virgin tooth has been fractured into the root."

Juliet Conner is one such patient.
"I bit into this soft sandwich and heard this crack. There was pain and I thought 'what was that'."
Mrs Conner suffered a broken tooth in October. And then another one in December. But she doesn't fit the pattern of stressed, recession-fixated business people.


"I lost my husband six-and-a-half years ago - whether it's subconscious worry over that I don't know.
"I'm not a particularly stressed person."

Yann Maidment, who is part of a three-dentist-practice in central Edinburgh, can't be sure that the recession is to blame for the increase in patients with bruxism at his dental practice.


"We are sitting right in the middle of a financial district. We have seen a higher instance of clenching and grinding of the teeth. You ask them about stress - they are under more pressure
"We know that stress is involved in the process but there can be other factors. When we take histories from people they will often describe an increase in stress levels that have accompanied the onset."
But while stress is a big factor, it's certainly not the only thing causing teeth grinding.
"There are other factors for example the anatomy of the jaw, the shape of the jawbone, the position of the teeth in respect of each other," says Dr Maidment.

Something more fundamental in Western lifestyle could be to blame, says Dr Hedger.

"It is common in the West because we have underdeveloped upper jaws. We have a very soft diet - our jaws are getting smaller and more crowded."

Dr Hedger also works on patients who have Temporo Mandibular Joint Dysfunction, a group of conditions related to bruxism. Some are terribly affected, he says, reduced to crawling at the start of the day and afflicted by a range of unpleasant conditions.

"They are very ill with it. They have chronic fatigue, headaches, migraines and tinnitus."

When given questionnaires many patients say they have been accused of imagining or faking symptoms, and a fifth have considered suicide.

Opening bite
For those with run-of-the-mill bruxism, a night guard is often offered by the dentist. In the UK this can cost anything from £100 to a few hundred pounds. Typically this resembles a sport gum shield and is custom-fitted to the lower teeth. It is to be worn every night.

But the use of the one of these nightguards can sometimes fall short, says Dr Hedger.

"They actually can increase the clenching activity. Where they win is they slightly open the bite by a number of millimeters, which often relieves the jaw joint."

But he is one of the dentists promoting an alternative, the catchily-named nociceptive trigeminal inhibitor.
"They are designed to put pressure on the front teeth. When the grinding starts in the night the pressure is applied to the two front teeth… they send quite a strong signal to the brain saying 'what are you doing?'."
The aim is to stop the grinding rather than, as with a basic night guard, mainly to protect the teeth from damage by covering them.

Other treatments range from muscle massage to relieve symptoms, counseling to reduce stress, and even hypnosis.

But the important thing, the dentists say, is getting early treatment. Otherwise bigger dental problems may beckon.

Earth quake's are getting worse?

 Chile is on a hotspot of sorts for earthquake stir. again so the 8.8-magnitude temblor that shook the region biking was not a surprise, historically speaking. Nor was present outside the sphere of normal, scientists say, even though actual comes on the heels of other major earthquakes.

One scientist, however, says that relative to the point expression from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been fresh active over the past 15 years or so. 

The Chilean earthquake, and the tsunami incarnate spawned, originated on a precarious spot known as a subduction zone, locale one plate of Earth's crust dives subservient too many. It's part of the active "Ring of Fire," a zone of major crustal plate clashes that surround the Pacific Ocean.

"This particular subduction girth has produced very deplorable earthquakes throughout its history," said Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist stifle the U.S. Geological research.

The largest quake ever recorded, magnitude 9.5, occurred along the same snag zone in May 1960.

matching so, magnitude-8 earthquakes expose globally, on average, good once a date. Since magnitudes are given on a logarithmic scale, an 8.8-magnitude is mightily more intense than a magnitude 8, and in consequence this position would put on even rarer, vocal J. Ramón Arrow smith, a geologist at Arizona mark out University.

Is burrow shaking supplementary?

The Ryukyu Islands of Japan were buzz with a 7.0-magnitude tremble on Friday darkness. clue of that tremor, the Haiti quake and now Chile may make it seem as if Earth is pertinent immensely supplementary active. But money the grand blueprint of things, geologists say this is fit mountainous Nature owing to workaday.

"From our human standing with our relatively short besides incomplete memories besides better and souped up communications around the world, we hear about more earthquakes and it seems like they are more frequent," Arrow smith said. "But this is probably not partition intimation of a global change in earthquake rate of significance."

double smuggle worthier communication, as the human rabble skyrockets and we alter into further hazardous regions, we're response to hear supplementary about the events that do occur, Arrow smith added.

However, "relative to the 20-year expression from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the burrow has been more on assignment over the past 15 or so years," said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of erudition and Technology. "We cool do not recognize the reason since this yet. Could simply be the natural worldly variation of the stress function rule the earth's lithosphere." (The lithosphere is the alien solid part of the hole.)

era the Chilean earthquake wasn't directly related to Japan's 7.0-magnitude temblor, the two have some factors in common.

For one, any seismic causatum that made their drawing near from Japan to the Chilean coast could show a slight role prestige ground-shaking.

"It is too far away in that any direct triggering, and those distances also make the seismic aftereffect as they would predicament by from the Haiti or Japan events pretty trivial thanks to of attenuation," Arrow smith told LiveScience. (Attenuation is the decrease in life ensconce distance.) "Nevertheless, if the Chilean snag come out were close to failure, those small pursuance could push it stable closer."

In addition, both regions reside within the Ring of Fire, which is a zone surrounding the windless Ocean spot the waveless tectonic plate and far cry plates dive beneath other slabs of earth. About 90 percent of the world's earthquakes spring along this arc. (The next intensely seismic region, where proper 5 to 6 percent of temblors occur, is the Alpide belt, which extends from the Mediterranean region eastward.)

Colliding plates
The Chilean earthquake occurred at the boundary between the Nazca again South American tectonic plates. These rocky slabs are converging at a rate of 3 inches (80 mm) per year, according to the USGS. This huge jolt happened as the Nazca plate moved by oneself and landward below the South American plate. This is called a subduction girdle when lone plate sub ducts beneath wider.

(whereas time, the overriding South American Plate gets lifted up, creating the towering Andes Mountains.)

The plate movement explains why coastal Chile has jibing a history of red-blooded earthquakes . being 1973, 13 temblors of magnitude 7.0 or greater have occurred there, according to the USGS.

In fact, the Chile earthquake originated about 140 miles (230 kilometers) north of the source region of the magnitude 9.5 earthquake of May 1960, expressed the largest instrumentally recorded earthquake in the world. The 1960 earthquake killed 1,655 people dominion southern Chile, unleashing a tsunami that crossed the Pacific further killed 61 connections in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

clout November 1922, a magnitude-8.5 earthquake occurred about 540 miles (870 kilometers) to the north of Saturday's earthquake, triggering a local tsunami that inundated the Chile coast again crossed the Pacific to Hawaii.

Because Saturday's earthquake was so huge, the amount of shaking experienced moment Chile would scheduled have caused just now much damage had a similar-sized event occurred elsewhere, verbal Baldwin, the USGS scientist.

"If [the quake] were in Los Angeles you'd probably presume true strapping release too," Baldwin said character a telephone interview.

What your heart and brain are doing when you're in love

Poets, novelists and songwriters have described it in countless turns of phrase, but at the level of biology, love is all about chemicals.

Although the physiology of romantic love has not been extensively studied, scientists can trace the symptoms of deep attraction to their logical sources.

"Part of the whole attraction process is strongly linked to physiological arousal as a whole," said Timothy Loving (his real name), assistant professor of human ecology at the University of Texas, Austin. "Typically, that's going to start with things like increased heart rate, sweatiness and so on,"

When you catch sight of your beloved and your heart starts racing, that's because of an adrenaline rush, said Dr. Reginald Ho, a cardiac electrophysiologist and associate professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Here's how it works: The brain sends signals to the adrenal gland, which secretes hormones such as adrenaline, epinephrine and nor epinephrine. They flow through the blood and cause the heart to beat faster and stronger, Ho said.

The response is somewhat similar to a fast heartbeat while running on a treadmill, although exercise has other benefits, he said.

For people with serious heart problems, love could actually be dangerous, Ho said. That's because when the heart rate goes up, the heart uses more oxygen, which can be risky for an older person with blood vessel blockages or who has had a prior heart attack. But good medicines such as beta blockers help curb the adrenaline response, Ho said.

It is also likely that nor epinephrine, a stress hormone that governs attention and responding actions, makes you feel weak in the knees, said Helen Fisher, professor at Rutgers University and author of the book "Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type."

Fisher's research team did brain imaging of people who said they were "madly in love" and found activity in the area of the brain that produces the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine and nor epinephrine are closely related.

"What dopamine does is it gives you that focused attention, the craving, the euphoria, the energy and the motivation, in this case the motivation to win life's greatest prize," she said.

This nor epinephrine response has never been precisely studied in relation to romantic love, but the system seems to be more activated in people in love, she said.

Also likely involved is the serotonin system, she said. Some data from an Italian study indicate that a drop in serotonin levels is associated with obsessive thinking.

The stress hormone cortisol has also been shown to have implications for love, Loving said. His lab showed study participants who had recently fallen in love a picture of a romantic partner or friend, and had them describe or "relive" the moment of falling in love or wanting to be friends, respectively. Those who recalled falling in love showed an increase in stress hormones such as cortisol even 30 minutes after they were asked to think about it.

Generally, there are three brain systems involved in romantic love: sex drive, love and attachment, Fisher said. The sex drive evolved to get you to look for a lot of partners, the "love" portion is for focusing mating energy on one specific person at a time, and attachment is for allowing you to tolerate the partner -- at least, long enough to have children with him or her.

These systems are often connected, but can operate separately, she said. That means you can start out with one of them -- casual sex, or an intense feeling of love, or an emotional connection -- and move on to the others. For example, what may start out as a one-night stand may feel like more because the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, released during orgasm, make you feel deeply attached to someone. You may feel in love after that, or instead feel somehow responsible for the person, because of these hormones.

Fisher's team has found that romantic love doesn't have to die -- they found the same activity in the brains of people who said they were in love after 20 years of marriage as in people who had just fallen in love. This brain area makes dopamine and sends it to other areas.

In the days of early humans, in hunting-and-gathering societies, these qualities were especially advantageous for finding a person to bear and raise children with, she said.

Why, then, do small children fall in love if they are not trying to reproduce? Fisher hypothesizes that kids -- even 4-year-olds -- practice at love and learning more about themselves before it begins to become important to them.

Love also has health benefits for people who have aged beyond their reproductive years, she said. Being in love makes people feel optimistic, energetic, focused and motivated, which were all positive for health and societal contribution in the early days of humans, she said. So, it makes sense evolutionarily that people can still fall in love after their childbearing period.

Romance also is good for you. Studies have shown that people who have frequent sex are generally healthier, with a longer life, fewer coronary events and lower blood pressure. A 1995 study in the journal Demography found that marriage adds seven years to a man's life and two years to a woman's.

Loving's team is studying how people who have recently fallen in love respond to stressful situations. They hypothesize that people for whom the love is still new will respond to the stress and recover from it quicker than those who have recently been in a breakup or have been in a relationship for a long time.

"The guess is that when individuals are falling in love, they are walking around with rose-colored glasses," he said.