what is a dental crown?

[Darren J]

Hallo

I recently had my back molar tooth root filled and my dentist told me that the tooth will need a dental crown in a couple of months if the root canal filling works. He did not have any time to explain to me what a dental crown is exactly.

At the moment the tooth has a large white filling inside it and does not hurt at all since the root filling was done a couple of weeks ago. I can chew on it as normal and the tooth even looks pretty good because my dentist replaced the old silver filling and changed it to a white filling after the root canal.

I would like to know firstly what a dental crown is exactly and secondly why do I need to have a dental crown on a tooth that is perfectly painless and not causing me any bother? Could I leave the tooth as it is without a dental crown? My feeling is that the less done to the tooth the better at this point.

[Dr Vahid Motahar]

Hi,

Thank you for your question.

I could not agree more when you say the less is done to a tooth the better it is. Very true, however, there are occasions that it is better to do a little more to a tooth because treatment is simply not completed and having a crown on a tooth that has had root canal treatment is one of those cases.

A dental crown is like a hat that sits on top a tooth and if you like keeps it all together and protects what is in under it. When a tooth has had root canal treatment that means there has been a large hole in the tooth due to decay,filling or the access cavity made to get to the nerve house of the tooth. This usually mean there is very little tooth is left and most of what you see in your mouth is a filling. to protect the filling and what is left of the tooth you need to crown the tooth.

If you do not do this there can be two major problems. First is that studies have shown that crowning a tooth after root canal improves the success rate of the root canal. In other words a tooth with root canal if not crowned it is more likely that the root treatment to fail. The other is that your tooth is more likely to fracture and break due to decay or week structure as earlier explained. So I fully agree with your dentist that your tooth should have a crown and I would do it.