The NobleDentist Blog

This is an article by Anne-Marie Tobin that appeared recently in The Canadian Press (www.canada.com).

TORONTO - Some people go under the knife or have injections every few months to smooth their skin, while others depend on wrinkle creams and lotions or just allow nature to take its course.

Whatever the approach, anti-aging products are a multibillion-dollar industry in North America, and now some dentists are getting into the act too.

A removable device called Angellift, manufactured in California, is worn inside the mouth and “gives patients another option to help them remain looking younger,” said Dr. Bruno Paliani, a London, Ont., dentist who’s among the first in Canada to start fitting patients.

Including visits, he charges less than $500 for an upper, and the same for a lower; some people take only one, some take both.

“It fits above the gum lines, and it lifts and supports the tissues around the face, so what it does is it removes wrinkles and it prevents further deepening of the wrinkles as the patients age,” Paliani said.

So far, he’s just in the early days of fitting a handful of patients. A spokesman for Medical Matrix, the U.S.-based company that developed and markets the device, said about 500 North American dentists are trained, but the company could not provide a list of other Canadians who have signed on.

Lisa Berk, a mother of three-year-old twins in San Diego, Calif., has been wearing one for about a year now—even though she’s only 39 years old, and not quite into wrinkle territory yet.

“I just don’t want to be wrinkled, and I know I don’t want to have to do plastic surgery or I don’t want injections, or anything like that,” Berk said.

“So I figure if I can just take care of my skin then hopefully I won’t have to worry about that down the line.”

Berk decided to get one after seeing a “dramatic” difference in her mother’s appearance after she got the device.

“With her, you can just see all of those lines filling out,” Berk said on the telephone from California.

“She’s not a smoker, but they kind of look like those vertical smoker’s lines, and you can just see how it fills that area.”

Dr. Wayne Halstrom, president of the Canadian Dental Association, said that fitting patients with the device “wouldn’t fall into something that I would participate in.”

He noted the association doesn’t take an official position on cosmetic procedures.

“When we talk about cosmetics in dentistry, our position on that would be yes, when it involves … replacement of teeth with bridges or dentures for cosmetic reasons. They also would have a dental reason for doing that,” he said from Vancouver. “In the case of the lift, there is no dental reason for doing it.”

But if someone decides to place such a device “near and at and around oral tissues both hard and soft, if I made that decision, I would quite likely go to my dentist, and say ‘Look can you do this for me, and make sure I don’t put myself in harm’s way?’ ”

There would also be issues of cleanliness and bacteria buildup, he noted.

“You’re introducing some new entity into the mouth and because it’s not related to the oral environment necessarily in the person’s mind, the question is, how clean do they keep them between wearings?” he said. “That’s a consistent concern for dentists who are treating patients with removable appliances.”

Aaron Bruce, an official with Medical Matrix in San Diego, said the lift can be worn all the time, but users are advised to remove it before eating.

A patient study that followed 170 people found that after 30 days, they wore the device for an overall average of three hours a day. Thirty-two patients reported discomfort and all 170 saw facial improvement.

After a year, it was worn for an overall average of 1.2 hours a day. Sixteen of the original 170 people could not be reached, but of the 154 who were contacted, 12 patients had discomfort and 143 reported facial improvement.

The Angellift came about when Medical Matrix was building a prototype insert for a California surgeon who wanted to give patients a “preview” of their appearance before putting implants under their lips.

The device has gone through some new engineering to include a type of wax that adheres to resin.

“We can actually allow the patient, with this wax, to be able to reduce, move, add to the lift any time they want,” Bruce said.

He acknowledged that dentists are heading into new territory, and said it has created “some conflict” with the medical community in the United States.

“There are certain people in the industry who do not believe the product should be handled by dentists,” Bruce said. “They want dermatologists and surgeons to handle the product.”

Dentists, he said, welcome it because it’s their only tool to fight wrinkles.

“And in the U.S., and in Canada, wrinkle fighting is a big business.”