Dental Crowns, The Materials And Drawbacks

Dental crowns, or simply known as crowns, are part of the many methods used in fixed prosthodontics. Fixed prosthodontics is a technique of dental restoration that mainly uses fixed restorations (also referred to as indirect restorations), which include inlays, onlays, dental veneers, dental bridges, and particularly dental crowns. Crowns are commonly used or applied in situations in which there is not enough remaining solid tooth structure after decay and fragile tooth structure is removed, or the tooth has fractured and is now missing important architectural reinforcements.

Materials used for Dental Crowns

Although not entirely, crowns were traditionally made up of gold. However, despite being referred to as a gold crown, this type of crown is actually composed of many different types of elements including the noble metals and base metals. Base metals include gold, platinum, and palladium, whereas base metals include silver, copper and tin. According to the cosmetic dentist hollywood, full gold crowns are of better quality when they are high in noble content. Full gold crown alloys can only be labeled as high noble when they contain at least 75% noble metal.

Other than gold, ceramic materials such as composite resins have also been used in dental crowns. In fact, ceramic crowns are increasingly being substituted in place of gold crowns for aesthetic and structural reasons. In a recent study, only 1.7% of the ceramic crowns needed to be replaced after 2 years, with 3.7% showing occlusal chipping without need of replacement. Furthermore, according to the cosmetic dentist hollywood, ceramic crowns are naturally tooth-colored which makes them more aesthetically-pleasing than gold. They are also obtained with less time spent at the dentist's office. However, there are several disadvatanges to using all-ceramic crowns. For one, ceramic restorations cannot be finished, polished or burnished at the margin as gold can, and thus possess a significantly lower level of marginal adaptation than does gold.

Second, the mechanical properties of gold that make its restorations superior to that of amalgam or composite, including but not limited to the properties of stress, strain, fatigue, creep, compressive and tensile strengths, modulus of elasticity, biocompatibility, elastic and plastic deformation, resilience and toughness, also make it superior to the ceramics utilized in CAD/CAM technology as well as the other all-ceramic restorations.

Disadvantage of Dental Crowns

The main disadvantages of restoration with a crown are extensive irreversible tooth preparation and higher costs than direct restorations such as amalgam or Dental composite. The cost of a crown in the United States and Canada can range from $800 to $3,100, depending on many factors, including which materials are to be used, where the practicing dentist is located, and if a prosthodontic specialist is performing the procedure. However, according to the cosmetic dentist hollywood, dental care provided by students at U.S. and Canadian dental schools can often be obtained for as low as $300.

Porcelain may cost about 20% more than full gold crowns, and the time-consuming processes of the operation is one reason for this high cost. Cost seems to be the limiting factor that precludes greater use of the procedure in the United States.