Transcript for:
Dental Anatomy: Wisdom Teeth

[Music] foreign this video is sponsored by bootcamp.com check it out for inbde prep and use coupon code mental Dental for 10 off hey everyone Dr Ryan here and welcome back to our Dental Anatomy series well this is the last video in the series on the different teeth we've finally made it to the furthest most posterior teeth in the mouth so I set up this video a little bit differently than the other ones because I won't be showing the different views of the tooth this time I'll just show and present the high-yield facts about the wisdom teeth in case any of them appear on your board exam so this should be a pretty quick video here we have the maxillary third molar and the mandibular third molar on the right so using the universal tooth numbering system these would include number 1 and 16 for maxillary and 17 and 32 for mandibular a couple of quick facts here that are interesting to know up to 35 percent of patients are missing at least one wisdom tooth so that's actually a pretty surprisingly High number of people and what I find so fascinating about this is over time and I mean thousands and thousands of years the human race has been trending toward having less and less teeth our ancestors had fourth molars and now we're seeing more and more people today missing their third molars and their second premolars and their maxillary lateral incisors and so on so just a really cool Trend to keep in mind also up to 90 of patients have at least one wisdom tooth that's impacted which means that the tooth is stuck and has not erupted fully and properly and again some people argue that the human Jaws are getting smaller which means there's less room to fit all the teeth so it makes sense that if there's one tooth to be impacted and not have enough room it's going to be the tooth that's last to the party last to come into the mouth which are the third molars at let's say roughly 18 years of age is when they're going to be erupting all right so for the maxillary third molar just a couple of quick things I wanted to talk about this tooth has the shortest Crown that's in an occluso cervical dimension of all the teeth in the mouth that shouldn't be all that surprising because one of the trends we talked about is that as you move distally from the anterior to the posterior you're going to see the Crown Heights shrink so of course if you're looking at the maxillary centrals those are some very tall teeth and when we go back as we go from maxillary Central to maxillary lateral back to the premolars and then the molars those teeth are getting shorter and shorter occlusive cervically and so the maxillary third molar is the shortest of all of them this is also the molar that most frequently has only three cusps and that makes it so it has this kind of heart-shaped occlusal view with two cusps on the facial and sometimes only one on the lingual that's fairly common to see that so it ends up looking like the three cusp heart-shaped variant that we talked about with the maxillary second bowler and then for the mandibular third molar this tooth has the shortest root of all the posterior teeth in the mouth the shortest root of all the teeth I would award that honor to the mandibular central incisor however I would give this tooth a trophy for having the most variable morphology of all the teeth and the mouth I've taken out several molars in my day as a dentist and these teeth particularly can have some pretty wacky Anatomy they can have four roots they can have five Roots three you can see a whole bunch of different things going on so super interesting and it'll always keep you on your toes this tooth also has the greatest distal root inclination unfortunately this picture doesn't show that all that well but you can see how the roots are tending to bend toward the distal Direction and also just note how small these teeth are both the maxillary and mandibular third molars are much smaller than their first and second molar counterparts also the roots are just extremely tapered and convergent you are not going to see those broad spread out routes that we saw in the first molars or the parallel roots in the second molars you're going to see this very shrunken in convergent tapering of the roots well as promised this was a very short video that's all I have for you on the third molars stay tuned for the next videos we'll talk more about occlusion how all of these teeth that we spent all this time discussing function together as a unit how they interact with one another and then of course we'll end the series with a bunch of practice questions to test what you learned so stay with it you're almost through the series and I'll see you all in the next video that's it for this video thank you so much for watching please like this video If you enjoyed it and subscribe to this channel for much more on Dentistry if you'd like to support me please check out my patreon page and thank you to all of my patrons for their support you can unlock access to my video slides to take notes on and practice questions for the board exams so go check that out the link is in the description thanks again for watching everyone I'll see you in the next video foreign [Music]