Mouthguards and sport in the spotlight for Dental Health Week 2026

During this year’s annual Dental Health Week (3-9 August), the ADA will be encouraging very busy 18-25-year-olds not to let good oral health and regular visits fall by the wayside in the middle of very busy lives.

Beyond this core oral health messaging and advocacy, the ADA will also run three mini-campaigns, focusing on three core areas of interest or concern for this cohort, drawn from recent consumer research commissioned by the ADA.

Mouthguards and sport

The 18-25-year-old cohort are often active in group and individual sports. With the intensity of play and level of activity many of these sports involve, there are resultant oral injuries including avulsion, luxation, subluxation, complicated and uncomplicated fractures (involving dentine and not involving dentine, respectively). This can occur in traditional high impact sports such as football and hockey, but also in other sports such as skiing and boxing.

While these injuries can have traumatic immediate short-term impact, they can also lead to long-term implications for teeth, fast-tracking the cycle of restoration, with trauma possibly leading to necrosis, resorption or ankylosis with further interceptive treatment required.

Compounding the issue for this younger group is that they also have an increased risk of caries and erosion from a high and repeated intake of sports and energy drinks. Compounded with the effects of dehydration from sporting exertion, this reduces saliva’s protective pH buffering capacities, protective enzymes and physical lubrication properties.

There will be an emphasis in this mini campaign on the wearing of custom-fit mouthguards, which are used less by women compared to men, less in regional areas than metropolitan and differing among income differences. The advantages of wearing a mouthguard will be promoted as will the benefits of primarily drinking water over energy and soft drinks.

More information on Dental Health Week as a whole will be released in July.