Football

Custom Mouthguards for Football

Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball with the foot to score a goal. A lot of people played it when they were kids or even adults as an enjoyable past time hobby. However, there are injuries associated with this sport. Especially when they take a hit to the face. Luckily damages can be reduced significantly with a customised mouthguard.

Most mouthguards used by players are the over the counter type and are considered to have limited effectiveness in injury prevention compared with custom-made mouthguards. Do you know that despite the widespread support is given to mouthguards in football, controlled trials of mouthguards in the football field have not been undertaken to date?

Mouthguards are widely recommended as an essential piece of protective equipment for football players.  Although the protective effect of mouthguards against head injury remains theoretical with only anecdotal or limited clinical evidence to suggest a beneficial result, it was nevertheless essential to test this premise of mouthguard efficacy in a controlled study. It can be intuitively appreciated that mouthguards are likely to provide a more protective effect about orofacial injuries. However, a controlled study would have needed to be significantly larger to have adequate power to detect a benefit if present.  

The community dental injury data showed that the majority of emergency dental injuries were due to sport and followed the temporal pattern of sports participation on weekdays and weekends. This has already been ongoing in MMA sports. Custom mouthguards for MMA are now making an appearance as a result.

It has been widely reported that participation in sports like football carries a considerable risk of sustaining dental injury. Contact sports are defined as those sports in which players physically interact with each other, trying to prevent the opposing team or person from winning.

First introduced by boxers in the 1920s and 1930s, mouthguards were soon used by gridiron footballers, primarily as a result of the pioneering work of some American dentists, the former demonstrating that ‘the wearing of a properly fitted mouthguard all but eliminated mouth injuries in High-School footballers.’ Mouthguards are not just useful in the prevention of dentoalveolar injuries.