What are Dental Crowns: Procedure, Types, Advantages & Aftercare Tips

What are Dental Crowns?

Tooth-shaped caps for placement over damaged teeth are called dental crowns. Crowns help protect and cover besides restoring the shape of your teeth when fillings are inadequate to resolve the problem. Materials like metals, and porcelain fused to metal, ceramic, and resin help make dental crowns. These generally don’t require special attention over time besides maintaining appropriate oral hygiene.

Procedure for Getting Dental Crowns

You typically require two visits to a tooth crown dentist near you in preparation for a dental crown.

During your first visit, your tooth receiving the crown is examined by taking x-rays of it and the surrounding bone. Our dentist in Houston, TX might suggest endodontic therapy if they notice tooth decay, risk of infections, or injury to the dental pulp. However, if you don’t have any conditions or threats, our dentist starts the preparation of the tooth.

You receive local anesthesia near the gums around the affected tooth before it is filed on the tops and sides to accommodate your chosen dental crown. How much tooth structure removal you need depends on the material for the dental crown you want over your teeth. After preparation, our dentist impressions the tooth receiving the crown. Our dentist in Houston, TX, also takes impressions of the teeth above and below the tooth to ensure your crown will not affect your bite.

Temporary acrylic crowns protect your prepared tooth until the dental laboratory fabricates your permanent restoration. The impressions taken by our dentist are forwarded to the lab to customize the dental crown you receive three weeks later.

Three weeks after getting your tooth prepared for the fixing, you revisit our Houston dentist to have your permanent dental crown. Removal of the acrylic restorations starts the procedure before our dentist checks the color and fit of the customized restoration. If everything is acceptable, our dentist permanently bonds the new crown to your tooth using special dental cement.

Types of Dental Crowns Available

As mentioned earlier, various materials help make dental crowns. The materials include metals including gold, palladium, nickel, and chromium that are durable for fixing your back teeth because they rarely chip or crack, last the longest, and require minimal tooth structure removal before placement. Metal crowns also withstand biting and chewing forces but are not aesthetically pleasing because of their color.

If you want a crown matched to the color of your remaining teeth, you can have porcelain fused to metal crowns having an aesthetically pleasing appearance. However, the metal under the crown becomes visible as a dark line over time. However, these clowns are excellent for your front or back teeth. Unfortunately, porcelain fused to metal crowns is prone to chipping and cracking and wearing the teeth in the opposite jaw when your mouth is closed.

Dental crowns provide natural-looking all-porcelain or all-ceramic crowns if you have metal allergies and cannot have porcelain fused to metal crowns. Unfortunately, they aren’t as durable as the latter but remain an excellent choice for your front teeth.

If you want an inexpensive option to fix your teeth, you can select all resin crowns that best suit your needs understanding they are not durable and likely to wear down over time and break as porcelain fused to metal crowns.

Advantages of Having Dental Crowns

• Your teeth sustain damage over time for various reasons. Injuries, tooth decay, and infections ensure your teeth lose their shape and size.
• Tooth-shaped caps, called dental crowns, help restore the tooth’s shape besides its strength, size, and appearance. The dental crown is bonded over your tooth to cover the entire visible portion of the tooth.
• You might need a new crown if you have a weak tooth from decay breaking apart or to keep it together if it has already lost parts of its crown.
• Crowns help restore a broken tooth or one severely worn and cover teeth with large fillings without sufficient tooth structure.
• Besides, the above dental crowns also help cover a severely discolored or misshapen tooth and function as restorations for a root canal-treated tooth. Dental crowns also function as restorations for dental bridges and over implants if you have missing teeth.

Dental Crowns After-Care Tips

• Dental crowns don’t require special attention besides appropriate oral hygiene practices.
• However, it helps if you remember the underlying beneath the crown is natural and needs protection from tooth decay and gum disease. Therefore you must incorporate practices like brushing twice daily and flossing once, especially around the crown area where your gums meet your tooth.
• You must also avoid biting hard surfaces with porcelain crowns to prevent cracking the restoration.
• If you manage your dental crown appropriately according to our dentist’s instructions, the restoration lasts five to 15 years before needing replacement. However, you can extend the lifespan of the repair by avoiding harmful mouth-related habits like clenching and grinding your teeth, using teeth to open packages, biting fingernails, and chewing lice.
• After spending considerable amounts on tooth restorations, you help yourself by caring for it and preventing additional expenditure by making the crown last for as long as possible.

Consult to a Tooth Crown Dentist Near You

Lynn Alan Palmer, DDS, provides dental crowns in Houston, TX 77024 to fix teeth damaged for various reasons. If you need this restoration on your teeth, please do contact our dental practice to get dental crowns!