Prosthetics

Loose or broken dentures can often be relined, rebased or repaired. Yeonhap Dental Clinic in Suwon explains when a new denture is the better choice.

The crown material is chosen according to how much tooth can be removed and the forces it will bear. Yeonhap Dental Clinic uses zirconia for most crowns and turns to other materials only when conditions do not fit.

Gold, hybrid, and e.max inlays differ in color, strength, and how they attach to the tooth. Yeonhap Dental Clinic mainly uses e.max, and also uses hybrid inlays for premolars.

An intraoral scanner records the shape of your teeth by imaging, without putting impression material in your mouth. It is reported to be more comfortable than conventional impressions in terms of gagging and discomfort, and one study found a comfort score out of 10 of 9.14 versus 2.57. However, Yeonhap Dental Clinic does not scan complete dentures or partial dentures, that is, dentures; the director takes the impression by hand. The gum a denture rests on has to be recorded with movement and pressing separated, and current scanners cannot do that distinction in place of an impression.

Unlike a gold inlay, which is retained by its shape, an e.max inlay is a restoration retained by bonding. So the completeness of the bonding protocol affects the result as much as the strength of the material. When bonding is done properly, the restoration and the remaining tooth structure behave as one body, but if any single step fails, bonding failure begins at that spot no matter how good the material is. Yeonhap Dental Clinic in Gwonseon-gu, Suwon, keeps to the sequence of doing the try-in first and then treating the ceramic surface, approaches enamel and dentin in different ways on the tooth surface, and, because we use a light-cure-only material, also manages the conditions under which light passes through the ceramic. The steps are not independent items; they are a chain in which each earlier choice determines the next.

Lower denture discomfort should be divided into a problem of coming loose (retention) and a problem of pain when chewing (support). The lower jaw offers only about half the supporting area of the upper jaw, so chewing pressure concentrates on the gums. For the lower jaw only, Yeonhap Dental Clinic in Gwonseon-gu, Suwon takes impressions in two stages and uses a bite design that directs force to the center of the ridge.

Crown lengthening is a procedure that exposes tooth structure that has dropped below the gum line to create a wall for the crown to grip, known as the ferrule. In exchange for gaining the wall, however, the bone around the tooth has to be reshaped, and the part that holds the root shrinks by the same amount. Yeonhap Dental Clinic aims for 1.5 to 2 mm of ferrule while stopping the removal at 2 mm between the restoration margin and the bone crest, and decides whether to proceed only after first measuring the root length that will remain after removal on 3D CT. The literature reports the lowest survival for teeth whose crown-to-root ratio became 1:1 after crown lengthening (Patil 2019), so Yeonhap Dental Clinic in Gwonseon-gu, Suwon, first checks whether the tooth will hold up afterward rather than whether the procedure can be done.