Tooth wear: lessons of the past. - ROS - 2014 - Tome 43 - N°1

This article is about tooth wear in the past populations and describes the main mechanisms on which it depends (two-body wear, three-body wear, biocorrosion). The tribological approach allows to systematize those mechanisms, thus helping us to understand them. Among these populations, tooth wear is intensive, systematic, abrasive and physiological because it is connected to food and its technologies. It affects proximal and occlusal faces, significantly modifying the occlusion plane which generally takes the shape of a double helix line. It is also associated with some functional dentoskeletal compensations of the manducatory apparatus such as continuous eruption, the mesial drift of the arches and the lingual tilting of the incisors. These physiological adjustments, mainly connected to the function and the ontogenesis, can also be found nowadays, although much more discreetly, in populations that are not affected with extensive tooth wear.