Typical question. Topical question.
Any person working in a dental clinic is confronted daily with questions of all kinds, repeated by many of his patients, and this is one of the most recurrent: how many teeth do we have?
It is not necessary (though it is quite useful for many other things) to go to the Spanish Society of Paediatric Dentistry to know that the infant dentition is smaller than the adult dentition, normally composed of 20 teeth, namely:
- 4 upper and 4 lower incisors (8)
- 4 canines
- 8 molars
All of them are temporary teeth which, except for some agenesis (missing teeth), will later be replaced by eight incisors, four canines and eight premolars (replacing the temporary molars), all of them permanent, and destined to remain in our mouths for the rest of our lives.
In addition, humans have a permanent first, second and third molar (also known as wisdom teeth) in each of their quadrants, making a total of 12 permanent molars, which, added to the previous ones, gives us a total of 32 teeth.
So, we know, the next time we are faced with this questionthe answer will be clear: 20 temporary teeth and 32 permanent teeth. Two nice and important figures, considering that the mouth is the tool that nature has given us to chew, eat, kiss, smile...