What Are the Main Benefits of Dental Bridges?

What are Dental Bridges?

Dental bridges are excellent restorative solutions to replace your missing teeth. Dental bridges help bridge the gap caused by tooth loss. This dental appliance consists of three crowns with two crowns positioned at both ends of the restoration to serve as abutments or anchors on the healthy teeth next to the edentulous gap. The crown in the center serves as a Pontic or artificial tooth.

If you have merely one tooth next to the gap, you can have a cantilever bridge or a dental implant to serve as an anchor. Dental bridges are fixed, indicating the abutment teeth are cemented to the healthy neighboring teeth or a dental implant. Different materials like metals, gold, silver, all-porcelain, and porcelain fused to metal helped make dental bridges.

Dental Bridge Procedure

If you need tooth placement solutions with dental bridges, you must schedule at least two appointments with dental bridges in Pflugerville, TX, to complete the procedure. During your first visit, you receive local anesthesia in the gums because the adjacent teeth need preparation by reshaping and resizing them. The adjacent teeth serve as abutments to accommodate the dental crowns that hold the Pontic in place. At the end of your first appointment, you receive temporary bridges to protect the prepared teeth.

During your second visit, the dentist in Pflugerville, TX removes the temporary bridge to replace it with a custom-created bridge explicitly for your mouth. The bridge is adjusted to ensure proper fitting. After completing the adjustments, the permanent bridge is cemented onto the prepared teeth.

Dental bridges have many advantages but also come with some risks.

Advantages of Dental Bridges

Below are the main benefits of dental bridges:

• Dental bridges replace your missing teeth to restore your mouth’s functionality and help you to speak and chew correctly.
• The replacements prevent your remaining natural teeth from shifting position towards the vacant gap to cause misalignments with your bite.
• In addition, the bridges help prevent jawbone resorption, which begins to occur tooth loss allowing you to maintain the structure of your face.
• Vacant spaces left by missing teeth become fertile grounds for bacteria and food particles to remain trapped and create dental issues like tooth decay and gum disease. Dental bridges prevent you from developing dental infections because you lost your tooth or teeth due to injuries, tooth decay, or conditions.
• Unlike dentures which require removal every night, dental bridges are fixed in your mouth and remain there for over a decade.

Downsides of Dental Bridges

The downsides of dental bridges are the following:

• Ill-fitting dental bridges can cause decay of the underlying tooth beneath the crown. Therefore you must maintain excellent dental hygiene to ensure plaque buildup doesn’t develop around your teeth or the dental bridge.
• The structural integrity of the neighboring teeth is compromised to accommodate the dental crowns holding the bridge. Tooth enamel removal doesn’t regenerate to confirm that the adjacent teeth remain weakened forever.
• If the supporting teeth are not durable, the restoration can collapse.
• Dental bridges eventually need replacements at some time later.

Dental Bridges Aftercare

When you consider having dental bridges as missing teeth replacements from the dentist near you, please discuss the entire procedure to understand the advantages and downsides of the process. Dental bridges undoubtedly help you replace your missing teeth with restorations that appear and function like your natural teeth. Your discussion with the dentist will help you make an informed decision.

Not having replacements for your natural teeth will make you a victim of the consequences of tooth loss to leave you with more problems than you can handle. For example, misalignments in your mouth will require orthodontic treatments, and infections like tooth decay and gum disease need frequent visits to dentists for restoration or maintenance. Instead, if you have dental bridges as replacements for your missing teeth, you prevent the onset of the consequences and enjoy a better quality of life with the replacement teeth.

You may think the dental bridge process is intensive and will cause plenty of discomforts. Although the procedure causes some pain, the advantages outweigh by far any problems you confront. The replacement teeth help you enjoy a better quality of life by restoring your mouth’s functionality and helping you prevent unnecessary consequences of tooth loss that confront you soon after losing your natural teeth. Therefore when faced with tooth loss, consider getting replacements as quickly as possible with excellent solutions from dental bridges and benefit from them.

If you consider tooth replacement solutions, we suggest you schedule an appointment with The Grand Family Dental to get dental bridges for your missing teeth.