Dental Crown

Dental Crown

Also known as Dental Cap is a sort of dental restoration which covers the whole crown part of a tooth or an implant. It is the treatment of choice if big part of tooth is destroyed by decay or is broken for any reason like trauma. The main reason we crown a tooth is to protect the remaining parts and keep everything together under the crown to prevent any future damage due to breaking or chipping. Note that even a tooth is crowned still there is a chance that the tooth itself decays and cause future problems. Normally nothing happens to crown itself but it is the tooth underneath which decays due to bad oral hygiene and usually the treatment would be replacing the crown.

In the past, crowns mainly were made of metal or combination of metal and porcelain. These days we can have a full porcelain crown (metal free crown). Depending on the case we choose one of these options:

• Full metal (precious or non precious)
• Porcelain fuse to metal
• Full porcelain
• Porcelain fuse to Zirconia
• Full Zirconia

Also in the past a technician had to lay down the porcelain by hand over the crown core and form it to the final shape of a crown. These days due to advancement of technology we can use machinery which are able to grind a full crown or core of a crown from a block of porcelain. These porcelain blocks are unprocessed and after shaping them to the final form need to be heated up to turn hard enough to last in the mouth environment.

Here are some examples of different types of crown.

In the picture below you can see a tooth split in half which has to be extracted. This tooth would not be like this now if it has been crowned.

specially root canal treated teeth need to be crowned to prevent these sort of situations. This is because a root canal treated tooth looses a big chunk of its structure due to decay and root canal treatment and also it becomes brittle due to not having blood supply and drying up.