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Dental Crowns and Bridges

Dental crowns and bridges can considerably improve the appearance of your smile, while preventing further damage and even worse dental issues in the future. Dental crowns replace eroded dentine, enhance the look of misshaped or stained teeth, and can enhance the longevity of any fragile natural teeth. Additionally, dentists use dental bridges and implantation crowns to restore lost teeth and enhance chewing, speech, and beautiful smiles. Here’s a primer on what crowns and bridges are, how they operate, what they address, and how much they cost.

What Is A Dental Crown?

A dental crown, also known as a cap, is a dental treatment that replaces the outermost part of the enamel with fresh material and spans the entire tooth. It is shaped and sized exactly like a natural tooth, and it comes into normal contact with the neighboring teeth, enabling you to chew food appropriately without “favoring” damaged or painful dentition. In functionality, a crown is extremely similar to a natural tooth. Depending on a specific crown’s composition, it can even appear as real as natural dentition.

How Do Crowns Function?

Crowns allow you to eat and speak normally, while also giving you an overall beautiful oral appearance. Dentists like the experienced professionals at Smile Design Dentistry can use a crown to rehabilitate your damaged or compromised teeth as a consequence of trauma, decay, fracture or a host of other dental issues to assist in avoiding additional harm, and potential tooth loss or other health issues down the road.

Your dentist can advise you on the best model of crown for your situation. Porcelain-veneered zirconia, all Ceramic porcelain, porcelain-fused-to-metal (PFM), and even gold alloy, or base-metal alloy crowns are several of the options that provide different materials, appearances and benefits in an area of dentistry that is constantly advancing and innovating.

Although gold alloy or other metal alloy alternatives are long-lasting and cost-effective, they will not resemble all your other dentition. Crowns made of porcelain, acrylic, or ceramic can be more evenly matched to your natural teeth, with experts singling acrylic and ceramic types for their long-lasting capabilities. Porcelain is far more susceptible to shattering and fracture than metal, yet porcelain linked to a metal casing can boost its strength while keeping a tooth-like appearance.

After consultation and deciding on a material, your dentist may eliminate any underlying decay or unstable tooth structure, and prepare your teeth for the crown using a local anesthetic. The practitioner will also create a mold or imprint of your mouth, which will be used to manufacture the new custom crown.

Some specialists offer same-day crown operations, while others send crowns to a laboratory, scheduling the procedure for setting them at a later date. If the latter is the case, your dentist may fit a temporary crown in the gap.

What Conditions Do Dental Crowns Address?

Dentists use dental crowns to restore otherwise unsalvageable teeth. They could also use them to hold dental bridges in place, as well as to cover implants. This procedure can be an extremely beneficial option for individuals who do not want to have their natural teeth extracted after incurring serious damage or fractures.

Dental crowns could be used to mitigate a variety of dental issues, including:

Rescuing badly damaged teeth
Managing toothaches or sensitivity
Guarding decayed teeth
Correcting scuffed, ruptured, compromised, or worn dentition
Reviving damaged as well as worn-down teeth
Improving chewing and eating capabilities

Dental crowns are a suitable option for patients with teeth that may be severely damaged cosmetically, but are otherwise healthy and do not have any periodontal issues. When you are concerned about saving your problematic tooth while adding strength and durability to your dentition at the same time, crowns can be an ideal solution.

What Is A Dental Bridge?

A dental bridge is a rooted partial denture that is fastened to your natural teeth, usually with dental adhesive glue. It substitutes some — but not all — of your teeth, and restores missing teeth with artificial dentition.

When there are functional teeth on both sides of a problem area, your dentist employs a bridge to substitute any number of missing teeth between the healthy ones. This bridge protects the retainers, which are the teeth adjacent to the missing dentition, in a manner similar to the way a crown protects a single tooth. The bridge also attaches the crowns to a pontic, or connective artificial tooth, in the void left by a lost natural tooth.

A bridge could consist of three parts in the event of a single lost tooth: one for the pontic, and one for each neighboring retainer tooth. Notably, bridges can be created from the same elements used to make crowns.

What is the Function of Dental Bridges?

Unlike crowns, which dentists can use to fix damaged teeth, bridges help to substitute one or more lost teeth.

Your dentist could set crowns on teeth that have been filed down, or employ dental implants at the outer edges of your area of missing teeth, to generate a bridge. They would then use pontics as substitute dentures that bridge the gap where teeth are lacking.

You can choose from a range of materials for your bridges, just as you can for dental crowns. However, you should always consider your dentist’s advice when it comes to picking the right material for your dental needs or issues. Cantilever, Maryland, and implant-supported bridges are some of the traditional choices among available options.

However, you will need to think about and evaluate a variety of factors when it comes to dental bridges, including the tooth’s visibility, your budget, the material’s toughness, and its appearance.

What Benefits Does a Dental Bridge Offer?

Having damaged, defective or missing dentition might have a variety of consequences. However, a dental bridge could definitely help with a variety of issues, such as:

Rebuilding your smiling face
Improving your face shape
Reviving one’s proper chewing capacity
Stopping your remaining teeth from shifting out of their positions
Rebuilding your speech and fluency
Re-adjusting your nibble to effectively disburse the pressure when chewing

The rates for dental crowns and bridges vary from one provider to the other, and are influenced by a multitude of variables. According to the Consumer Guide to Dentistry, one dental crown can cost anywhere from $1000 to $3,500, while dental bridges can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000, on average. Remember, though, that these are basic average figures, and costs could vary greatly, depending on materials, the amount of work needed and your specific dental needs. Always start by scheduling a consultation with a qualified and experienced dentist to determine your needs, potential costs, and whether any dental insurance you might have would cover some or all of the cost.

How Much Does it Cost to Get a Dental Crown or Bridge?

Let Our Smile Design Dentistry Specialists Help You

Smile Design Dentistry’s crew is here to accommodate you when you need bridges or crowns, as well as any other dental work, from cleanings to root canals and beyond. We are a family-owned business with multiple locations serving the Central Florida and Tampa Bay areas. Contact us today to book an appointment.

Family-owned and operated, Smile Design provides personalized attention for each of our patients throughout the state of Florida. We believe in building a strong, trusting relationship with our patients and we’ll take the time to get to know you, listen to your concerns, and answer any questions you may have about your dental hygiene, oral health problems, the treatments our doctors recommend, and your smile appearance.

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