Dental radiography is essential for comprehensive cat dental care, revealing root disease, resorption lesions, and bone loss invisible to visual examination.
Dental radiography transforms the quality and completeness of dental care available to cats. Without radiography, a veterinarian performing a dental cleaning is working blind - the visual appearance of teeth above the gumline frequently does not reflect the disease burden below. Cats enduring dental cleanings without radiography may leave with visually clean teeth while retaining root fragments from incomplete extractions, undetected resorption lesions destroying teeth from below, and undiagnosed bone loss from periodontitis. These hidden conditions cause ongoing chronic pain that owners cannot detect and that veterinarians cannot identify without radiographic equipment. Practices that offer full-mouth dental radiography provide dramatically better welfare outcomes than those performing dental procedures without imaging.