Crowns and Bridges

A dental crown is a tooth-shaped "cap" that is placed over your tooth to cover and restore its natural/original shape and size, to improve its strength, and to enhance the tooths appearance.  Once cemented in place, crowns fully encase the visible portion of the underlying tooth above your gum line.

Crowns are used for these various reasons:

• To protect a tooth that has become weak, often due to decay and to help prevent it from breaking - or to hold the parts of a cracked tooth together to help reduce future problems with the tooth
• To restore the appearance (size and shape) of a broken or severely worn tooth
• To cover and provide needed support for a tooth with a large filling
• To cover a tooth that has become either severely discolored or mis-shapened
  
• To secure in place a dental bridge
  
• To cover a dental implant

Currently, one of the most popular restorative materials for permanent crowns is zirconia, a solid ceramic, digitally constructed in a lab and typically require little or no adjustment in the chair, which reduces your time in the office.  Other advantages to zirconia crowns are that they are extraordinarily durable and resistant to fracture, their translucent appearance mimics that of natural teeth, they typically require less tooth removal, and there is no unsightly metal fuse at the gum line.  Other options we offer are either all-porcelain, porcelain fused to metal or gold crowns.

A bridge is used to fill a gap in your mouth where an existing tooth or teeth have been lost or are missing.  A bridge is composed of two or more crowns placed over the teeth on either side of this gap.  The crowned teeth are used to anchor the bridge in place and are referred
to as the "abutment teeth" - the gap is filled with a false tooth/teeth, called "pontics", which are made from gold, alloys porcelain or a combination of these various materials.  Dental bridges are supported by natural teeth or implants. 

Bridges are used for a number of reasons:

• To help restore the appearance of your smile
• To aid in your ability to speak and chew properly chew
• To correct your bite by re-distributing the forces in your mouth by replacing missing teeth
• To help prevent your remaining teeth from drifting out of their current positions
• To help maintain the shape of your face