Case report describes severe periodontal destruction from migrating elastic bands in a 9-year-old child, highlighting the dangers of unsupervised diastema closure.
Despite the improvement of protocols for eliminating diastema in children and adolescents, there are some cases of orthodontists prescribing the wearing of elastic bands, which, if worn uncontrollably and without retention points on the teeth, can enter the periodontium, causing destruction of the tissues surrounding the teeth. This iatrogenic complication, if unfavorable, may necessitate the extraction of teeth. The article presents a clinical case of removing elastic bands from periodontal tissues in a 9-year-old child which remained in periodontal tissues for more than 2 months.
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Zhidkov et al. (2026) studied this question.
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