What is a Dental Sealant?

Watch this video by Dr. Bianca Esparza where she explains how we are able to prevent cavities in the molars for several years using dental sealants.

The purpose of dental sealants is to prevent cavities. Now, when we have very deep grooves in our teeth, meaning there’s a lot of hills and valleys in them, we want to cover that up, because when there’s a lot of grooves in those teeth, it’s a higher risk for cavities. Imagine you have a sticky food. If we have more of a flat surface, that sticky food is going to be easily brushed off. But when we have a big groove in those teeth, it’s going to stay in there and it’s harder to brush, meaning that we can get cavities a lot sooner than you might like.

So with a dental sealant, we clean that area and we flatten it out, kind of like a varnish we put on that tooth to prevent cavities. It’s a fantastic, cost efficient tool to prevent cavities.