When is a dental crown needed?

When a tooth is too broken down for a routine filling to be effective, a crown is placed over the entire tooth to restore function and esthetics. They can be made of many different materials such as gold, porcelain fused to gold, zirconia, porcelain to zirconia and lithium disilicate.  Obviously the choice of material depends upon the clinical situation.

Modern Esthetics

There have been tremendous advances in porcelain technology, which in turn allow us to fabricate crowns that are 100% metal-free. These types of crowns are especially useful in the front of the mouth, so that we can eliminate the black lines that you can sometimes see around older crowns. Plus, these new materials require less drilling, which saves more natural tooth structure.