Friday, April 24, 2015

Dental Crowns: Types & Uses

Dental crown is a tooth shaped cap placed over to cover the tooth for restoring its size, shape, strength and to improve its appearance.

Types of crowns
Various materials are used to make dental crowns where stainless steel, all resin, all ceramic and other metals can be used for making permanent crowns.

Metals: various metals that are used in making dental crowns include base metal alloy, gold alloy, other alloys like palladium. Compared to other crown types metal crowns needs less tooth structure to be removed and tooth wearing is kept to minimum.  They can withstand the pressure due to chewing and biting and hence lasts longer. Metal crowns makes a good choice for out of sight molars.

Porcelain fused to metal: Unlike the metal crowns porcelain made crowns can be color matched with adjacent teeth. However more wearing to opposite teeth occurs with this crown type. Next to that of all-ceramic crowns, porcelain fused metal crowns look more like normal teeth. They make a good choice for back and front teeth.

Stainless steel: These are prefabricated crowns used on permanent teeth as a temporary primary measure. Crown covers the entire tooth and protects it from further decay. Stainless steel crowns are mostly used for childrens teeth because they don't require numerous dental visits and hence are most cost effective than that of custom made crowns.

All ceramic or all porcelain: This type of crowns provide better natural color match than other crown type and is recommended to people with metal allergies. All ceramic crowns make a good option for front teeth.

All resin: these are less expensive than other crown types and are more prone to wear down in the long run than the porcelain fused type crowns.

Why dental crown is needed?
Dental crown may be needed in following situations:
  • To cover and support a tooth with large filling when there isn't a more of the tooth left.
  • For holding the cracked tooth together or protecting a weak tooth from breaking.
  • Helps in restoring tooth that has worn down or already broken.
  • To cover a severely discolored teeth.
  • For holding the dental bridge in place.
  • In making a cosmetic modification.
  • Used for covering any cosmetic modification.
For children, dental crown may be used on primary teeth to:
  • Protect the teeth from risk of tooth decay, especially when the child has difficulty in keeping with daily oral hygiene.
  • Save the tooth that has been damaged by decay and couldn't support a filling.