Crowns fit over worn, weakened; root canal treated or damaged teeth. They can also serve a cosmetic purpose, restoring a discolored tooth to its former color. A dental bridge spans the gap where a missing tooth once was, filling the space with an artificial tooth. Without something to occupy gaps, remaining teeth can shift position and alter your bite. Like a bridge over a river, most dental bridges need support at either end, which unfortunately requires reshaping the adjacent teeth and capping them with artificial crowns to hold the bridge securely. In modern conservative dentistry, bridges can fall under the category of wasting procedures (because they waste the structure of the natural adjacent teeth) and hence dental implants provide a better solution by simply replacing the missing tooth/teeth and conserving the adjacent natural teeth.
Types of Crowns and Bridges
Dental crowns and bridges generally fall into three categories: full metal, porcelain fused to metal and full body porcelain. Your dentist will assess your dental health and discuss your options with you, but all three types have distinct advantages. At
Dr. Raed M. Abutteen Dental Center, you will never leave without a temporary crown and/or bridge which protects your prepared teeth and saves your smile.
All-Metals:
Precious metals have tremendous durability and are non-reactive. These characteristics make them a preferred material for dental crowns. Gold alloys are the most common metal for crowns, but some dentists also work in platinum or palladium alloys that have a silvery hue. Metal crowns offer outstanding longevity, but because they look nothing like natural tooth enamel, they are most often used for molars where they will not be as visible.
Metal and Porcelain:
Porcelain fused to metal (PFM) conceals metallic surfaces under a ceramic layer that closely resembles natural tooth enamel. The metals within can be precious, semi-precious, nikel-free and non-precious metals. Because of their metal cores, these crowns reveal their underlying structure in strong light and lack the translucency of natural teeth. However, their color and texture make them well suited to capping front or back teeth. PFM crowns cause more wear on opposing teeth.
Full Body Porcelain: 
Porcelain crowns have the most natural look and are generally indistinguishable from natural teeth. Due to advancement in ceramics they are every bit as strong as metal or PFM crowns. New
CAD/CAM techniques (computer aided design-computer aided manufacturing) allow dentists to create crowns in minutes, and patients can enjoy having a crown/ bridge in one office visit. Porcelain crowns made in this way wear at the same rate as natural teeth.
At
Dr. Raed M. Abutteen Dental Center, we highly encourage the use of all porcelain non-metal containing crowns and bridges with E-Max and Zirconia materials. We use digital scanners and
CAD-CAM machines that produce crowns/bridges within a very short period of time and spare patients the classical hustle of going back and forth in multiple sets of appointments to receive their crowns or bridges.
