Dental Avulsion occurs when a tooth is knocked out of its socket, with the ligament being stretched to the point of tearing. This normally occurs because of trauma, and can often times be reattached without much of an issue if the tooth is kept safely and a dentist is visited as soon as possible (within a few hours). Making sure the tooth is in an environment as similar to the mouth as possible, with the least amount of pressure on it, is key for making sure it can be reattached without significant problem.
However, if kept dry the PDL cells will begin to die after fifteen minutes and, without a biologically rejuvenating medium, will all be dead within sixty minutes. Often a dentist is not available within sixty minutes and so the knocked-out teeth must be placed in a trauma free and biologically restorative environment. The only medical device that can safely protect and rejuvenate teeth for twenty four hours is the Save-A-Tooth system.

Save-A-Tooth offers a method for you to store an avulsed tooth in a solution by offering a system that can help the patient store it safely, which will help relieve them of stress from the incident. For more serious issues that require a dentist, it keeps the tooth in a place that will keep the ligament safe until you can see your dentist. With Save-A-Tooth, it allows for a 90% chance that the knocked-out tooth will be able to be safely reinserted. Some dentists recommend using milk, but there have actually been no human studies proving that milk actually helps. The human socket it came from is the best environment for the tooth, but it runs the risk of crushing the cells involved with the ligament therefore making the reattachment rate drop dramatically.

Even laboratory and animal studies show that storage of teeth in milk only maintains the vitality of PDL cells at 20-40%. This is because milk has no available rejuvenating metabolites like Ca+ or glucose. When it was first recommended thirty years ago, it was a good storage medium but now it is an old, inferior technology. The old rationale for milk was that it was available everywhere. This is untrue. For example, it is not available in automobile accidents, sports playing fields or in hospital emergency rooms.

One thing you must remember is to never touch the root of the tooth. This causes similar damage. Keeping the tooth in a sterile solution container until it reaches the dentist is your best bet. Dentists, mothers, athletic trainers and healthcare personal should change their thinking to a preventive one rather than a reactive one. They should consider the treatment of knocked out teeth the same way that people think of severe allergic reactions to bee stings or food. An EpiPen needs to be purchased ahead of time since when it is needed it must be available immediately. If people have to look for one when the allergic reaction begins, the person might die. Similarly, if a tooth is knocked out, a SAT kit must be available immediately, or the tooth will die and be rejected by the body after it is re-implanted.

SAT kits should be purchased and readily available by schools, dentists, emergency rooms, ambulances, sports teams and, generally, anywhere people are active. Since the SAT kit lasts two years, is the saving of a front tooth worth $12.50 a year?