I’m going to talk about the stages of an abscess. Best Treatments for Tooth & Gum Abscesses. An abscess is merely an infection that is trapped somewhere. It can be a gum abscess or abscess tissue in which the outer layer of the skin or gum is still intact and that part of the skin is still attached to some structure, usually bone, sometimes ligament or cartilage and there is enough attachment in the attacked surface of the tissue traps that infection.
As the infection grows pressure is created just simply by increased volume. When the tooth is concerned. If you think of this ball point pen as a tooth. This portion being the part of the tooth that you normally see in your mouth and this portion being the root structure.
The root of a tooth has a small opening right at the very tip of the root and blood vessels and nerves enter the tooth through that opening. Inside the tooth there is a chamber; a hollow chamber in which the contents of the tooth, the nerves, the blood vessels and other tissue reside.
If you get bacteria exposed either through decay or a fracture or some trauma causes enough loss of blood supply that just a normal bacteria that are running through your body can find a way into the tooth.
The infection begins to try to establish itself. Unlike other parts of the body where the body can increase blood supply and ward off infection inside a tooth it has very little blood supply to start off with and any increase in blood supply creates enough pressure that it constricts further blood supply.
Just simply because of the small aperture at the very end. So, the abscess is initially contained in the tooth. It will create hypersensitivity, greater response to cold than normal, greater response to heat than normal, greater response to physical stimulation than normal.
As the abscess, the infection in the tooth, that’s trapped in the tooth begins to spread outside the tooth into first the ligament it causes pain, because it’s of the volume of the infection trapped. Eventually that infection will overwhelm the bone and create a actual void in the bone.
It’s at this point in time that you can see one on the x-ray. Beyond that the abscess can spread into other parts of the body.
