Looking After A New Dental Crown

With good care, your crown should provide many years of trouble free service.

Where a straightforward filling would not be sufficient to effectively restore a tooth, porcelain or ceramic crowns are often the next option. These are also used in the completion of a dental implant procedure as well as root canal treatment. Once attached to the prepared tooth, they can last for many years and should give you little trouble, providing that you look after them.

Although a crown will not deteriorate as it is made from ceramic or porcelain, and therefore can’t suffer from decay, you do still need to take care of it, and, in today’s Mike Allen blog, we take a look at how you can do so.

Daily cleaning

Your crown does not require any real additional care to the rest of your teeth but if your cleaning regimen is sub-standard however, your crown may be at risk. Whilst the crown will not decay, the tooth that it is attached to can, and if it does, the crown may become loose or even detach. The problem does not end there though – the underlying tooth will likely need to be repaired and could well change shape slightly, meaning that you may need to have a new crown made to fit it. This means an additional expense for our Burton patients, which may well have been avoidable.

Gum disease

Cleaning your teeth well is essential, not only to protect the crown and any other restorations, but also to ward off gum disease. If you do not use floss at the moment, this is something that we would definitely recommend. The addition of this to your daily cleaning, along with a professional hygienist clean, known as a ‘scale and polish’ twice a year should be sufficient to keep your mouth free of gum disease.

If you fail to keep your gums clean, periodontitis can occur. If it does, the bone structure becomes weaker and may cause teeth to fall out. There is no point in having a firmly attached crown if the tooth itself has come out!

Ageing  adhesive

Providing that you have your biannual check at Mike Allen’s Dental Practice, we should be able to detect if there are any problems with the adhesive which attaches your crown as it becomes older. Although rare, it is not unheard of for a crown to become detached and this usually happens, in the rare cases that it does, towards the end of its natural life.

If this should happen to you, whether the crown is fairly new, or more likely if you’ve had it for many years, please don’t attempt to reattach it yourself. You can damage both the crown and the natural tooth if you do. If you have any problems or concerns with your crown, you should call our Burton dentists straight away for an appointment.

Mike Allen’s Dental Practice is open from Monday to Friday and appointments can be made by calling us on 01283 845345.