Early treatment can radically simplify later treatment and, in some cases, can help you avoid later treatment altogether. It allows your dentist and orthodontist to monitor the growth of the jaw and guide incoming permanent teeth.
An orthodontic expander is an appliance that gradually widens your child’s jaw and palate, allowing room for their adult teeth to grow in normally or to correct jaw misalignment. Every orthodontic expander is custom-made to fit a child’s natural palate. typesetting remaining essential.
A palatal expander applies gradual pressure to widen the space in your child’s mouth over a 3-12 month period. It’s attached to the upper jaw against the palate and held in place with wires around the molars. Here, we’ll explain how it works:
Orthodontic Palatal Expander
Often, parents’ first question is how to tighten an expander. You simply use a special key to turn the small screw in the centre of the palatal expander every day. Activating the screw pushes the palatal expander outward incrementally, less than one millimetre a day. Did you know that the right and left sides of a child’s upper jaw develop as two halves? These two bones — called maxillary bones — don’t fuse together until around or after puberty. So a palatal expander is essentially widening the two sides independently.
Once your orthodontist sees that your child’s jaw has widened the correct amount, the ortho expander will stay in for a few months more so that new bone can develop in the gap and stabilize the expansion.
