Are Crooked Teeth Genetic?

Teeth feel pressure!

Your tongue, cheeks, and lips all push on your teeth in different directions. Since teeth move in response to pressure, your teeth end up where these forces are in balance. The result is often crowded teeth in people with tight or firm lips and cheeks. People with stronger or larger tongues frequently have spaces.

Teeth also respond to the forces YOU put on them. If someone sucks their thumb often and for long enough, their teeth won’t come together in the front (this is called an open bite). The same thing will happen if you have any other habit that involves touching your teeth: nail biting, chewing on a pencil or tooth pick.

Bone Structure Matters

Severe bite problems are often caused by a disproportion in the size and/or position of the upper and lower jaws. This can easily be seen to run in the family: strong and weak appearing chins are the most obvious of these disproportions. Orthodontic treatment may camouflage these problems, but jaw surgery is the only way to fix the underlying cause.

Dental Development

Teeth find their positions in the mouth based on where the tooth bud forms inside your jaw. When the tooth bud cells are too far from their ideal positions or when they’re at an angle, the tooth often erupt in an abnormal position, become impacted, or cause baby teeth to be lost prematurely. Many of these problems are unavoidable and have to be treated later with braces. However, some issues can be eliminated or allow for decreased orthodontic treatment time later if caught early by an orthodontist. That’s why the American Association of Orthodontists recommends having your child evaluated at age 7!

1. Garib, D.G.; Alencar, B.M.; Ferreira, F.V.; Ozawa, T.O. Associated dental anomalies: The orthodontist decoding the genetics which regulates the dental development disturbances. Dental Press J. Orthod. 2015: 15 (2)