Do you ever feel like one or more of your teeth are loose? I have and it is a really unnerving feeling. I felt like surely I’m just imagining things; my teeth could not simply be ‘loose’. But evidently relaxin, the hormone responsible for relaxing the ligaments in the pelvis, also affects our teeth. I wasn’t crazy- my teeth were really moving!

The danish even have a saying: “et barn, et tand” which means gain a child, lose a tooth. How strange a saying. But there was a study done that revealed that women do lose teeth often with pregnancy.

At first I thought it must be because nutrient demands are so intense in pregnancy that it is leached from the mother’s body, but thankfully that has been proven to be false.

In the study, they looked at multiple factors and concluded that the most likely cause of tooth loss during and shortly after pregnancy is from gum inflammation associated with the gingivitis. Ordinarily this inflammation is not such a big deal, but in pregnancy it combines with the effects of relaxin and can make a tooth literally fall out.