Some people are genetically prone to have an underbite. It’s just programmed into your genes and that’s how you grow. Usually, you have parents or family members that have an underbite. Basically, it’s either your lower jaw just grows too much or your upper jaw doesn’t grow enough.

There’s not a lot to do to change that.

It can be fixed without surgery but that depends on how severe your underbite is.

Your teeth have to sit within the jawbone. We can’t move the teeth outside of that jaw bone. Teeth can move forward or back about five millimeters. If you have a 10-millimeter underbite, you can’t move your top teeth forward five millimeters and bottom teeth back five millimeters. If you try to do that, you’d be hitting edge to edge.

So if your underbite is more than nine or ten millimeters, in order to successfully fix that without surgery, it’s going to be really difficult. If your underbite is to that severity, moving the jawbone is the only real way to get it fixed. It is something that not a lot of patients do. It is a big deal to get jaw surgery. But if you have a severe underbite, that is going to be the absolute best method to fix it.

If it is a mild to moderate underbite, that sometimes can be fixed either with extractions, rubber bands, or spring.

But it has to move the teeth enough within the bone in order to get a full correction. If the answer is no, then we either have to move the bones or just leave the bite as it is. So definitely ask your doctor as far as which is going to be an option for you and hopefully, they can get you a good option that works for you at an early age. Sometimes if you’re a young man, your jaw keeps growing until you’re like 19 or 20. It really depends on when you’re going to stop growing.

Hope this helped give you some insight and definitely ask your doctor for more specifics about your treatment. If you have any questions, feel free to leave comments below.