06/30/2026
🦷 If you have read some of our previous posts, you may already know that most discoloured teeth are nonvital. Do you know that not all nonvital teeth are discoloured?
🐶 This is Charlie, a 3.5-year-old Pomeranian. With the good intention of maintaining Charlie’s dental health, her family provided her with deer antlers to chew on, which unfortunately fractured her right maxillary 4th premolar (108). As always, we took whole-mouth radiographs, assessed all her teeth, and found out the extent of the damage was much more than one tooth.
😱 Although there was no obvious discolouration upon visual assessment, radiographically, 8 of her teeth had larger pulp chambers, indicating they were nonvital (dead). Some showed periapical lucency, indicating infection around the root tips. How do we know teeth with larger pulp chambers are nonvital? When teeth are newly erupted, they have large pulp chambers and thin dentin walls. As the pet ages, more dentin is produced, making the walls thicker and chambers smaller. When blunt force injury occurs (such as chewing on hard objects), a tooth may die, stop producing dentin, and the pulp chambers remain the same size. As other teeth continue to mature, the nonvital teeth show larger chamber size than others. The difference in chamber size can be difficult to appreciate when the injury occurred recently or when the pet is older.
😟 Unlike humans, pets cannot tell us whether a nonvital tooth is painful. The dead pulp inside can become necrotic and cause infection around the root tips (as in Charlie’s case); therefore, nonvital teeth should be treated with either extractions or root canal therapy. Due to the large number of teeth affected, all 8 of Charlie’s nonvital teeth, as well as the 108 with a complicated crown-root fracture (fracture extended beneath the gumline), were extracted. Charlie’s family was also informed about the ‘kneecap’ rule. They will get rid of all the hard chew toys and replace them with safer items for her.
