Guidelines Of Applying A Dental Bridge

The attachment of dental bridges is one of the many procedures of dentistry under the category of cosmetic dentistry. This is because it involves the reconstruction, the restoration, and the improvement of the aesthetics of the teeth, by way of replacing a missing tooth by joining permanently to adjacent teeth or dental implants. There are different types of bridges, depending on how they are fabricated and the way they anchor to the adjacent teeth. Conventionally, bridges are made using the indirect method of restoration. However, bridges can be fabricated directly in the mouth using such materials as composite resin. So how is a dental bridge applied? And what are the guidelines that dentists take when applying a dental bridge?

Applying a Dental Bridge
A bridge is fabricated by reducing the teeth on either side of the missing tooth or teeth by a preparation pattern determined by the location of the teeth and by the material from which the bridge is fabricated. In other words, the abutment teeth are reduced in size to accommodate the material to be used to restore the size and shape of the original teeth in a correct alignment and contact with the opposing teeth. According to the cosmetic dentist hollywood, the dimensions of the bridge are defined by Ante's Law: "The root surface area of the abutment teeth has to equal or surpass that of the teeth being replaced with pontics".

Guidelines for applying Dental Bridges
When a single tooth requires a crown, the prosthetic crown will in most instances rest upon whatever tooth structure was originally supporting the crown of the natural tooth. However, when restoring an edentulous area with a bridge, the bridge is almost always restoring more teeth than there are root structures to support.

For instance, the 5-unit bridge will only be supported on three abutment teeth. According to the cosmetic dentist hollywood, in order to determine whether or not the abutment teeth will be able to support a bridge without a virtually guaranteed failure due to lack of proper support from the remaining root structures, the dentist should employ Ante's rule, which states that the roots of the remaining abutment teeth must possess a combined total surface area in three dimensions more than that of the missing root structures that are to be restored with the bridge.

When a posterior tooth that is intended to become an abutment tooth already possesses an intracoronal restoration, it might be in order to make that bridge abutment into an inlay or an onlay, instead of a crown. However, this may concentrate the torque of the masticatory forces onto a less enveloping restoration, thus making the bridge more prone to failure.

In some situations, a cantilever bridge may be constructed to restore an edentulous area that only has adequate teeth for abutments either mesially or distally. However, according to the cosmetic dentist hollywood, this must also conform to Ante's rule. A modification to the rule must be applied because there are only abutments on one side. These bridges possess double abutments in the majority of cases, and the occlusal surface area of the pontic is generally decreased by making the pontic smaller than the original tooth.