Metal-free ceramics or a ceramic-metal crown – what’s better?
Several factors are immediately put on the scales: cost, quality, service life, guarantees, impact on the body, the possibility of repair, and much more. The patient always wants to receive a high-quality, safe, long-term and inexpensive solution to his problems and a comparison of these prosthetic options will help you choose when you have to choose.
Ceramics
Basic characteristics: crowns consist of a strong metal frame, which the technician covers with a ceramic mass. The crown is very durable and able to withstand large chewing loads without deformation.
The main advantages are:
- Reasonable cost
- Strength
- Approximate color matching adjacent teeth
The disadvantages are:
- The metal at the base of the ceramic-metal crown does not transmit light, unlike its teeth, so it loses the appearance of a natural tooth
- Cyanosis of the marginal gingiva – in most cases, immediately after prosthetics or in the distant future, you can notice the appeared cyanosis of the gingival margin in the area of crowns. This is due to the presence of a metal frame. If a person smiles widely (the gum is clearly visible with a smile), then cyanosis can be striking
- The marginal fit of the crown to the tooth cult is often much worse on cermet crowns. With poor-quality marginal fit around the perimeter of the crown gingivitis begins to develop, caries and tooth slowly begins to decay
- The manifestation of an allergic reaction to the metal, the phenomena of galvanism (the appearance of a metallic taste in the mouth), oxidation are possible – these causes can lead to gum disease and other problems
Metal-free crowns
They are made of high-strength dental ceramics without the use of metal components. Metal-free ceramics is the most popular type of prosthetics when it is necessary to solve aesthetic problems and the goal is to achieve maximum naturalness and the greatest service life of orthopedic work.
The main advantages of non-metallic crowns are:
- Minimal turning of tooth tissues under non-metal structures, i.e. Preservation of the tooth vital (alive). There is no need to remove the tooth as in case of a ceramic-metal crown
- High aesthetics of the results is achieved due to the special optical properties of the structure (translucency and opalescence) as in your teeth
- Lack of blueness of the gingival margin in the area of the crowns due to the lack of metal and the natural look
- The absence of allergic reactions to the material and the biological compatibility of ceramics with the tissues of the teeth and gums
- The use of cad / cam technologies in production (computer-programmable manufacturing) allows to achieve the highest precision of workmanship and its perfect and exact fit, and this is fundamentally different from manual casting in the manufacture of ceramic-metal crowns. At the same time, the edge fit is very accurate, which can significantly increase the service life of the work
The disadvantage of non-metal ceramics is:
- Its higher cost compared to ceramics
- Individual intolerance, which is extremely rare
It can be concluded that non-metal crowns are superior in all respects to ceramic-metal crowns and will replace them in the near future as well as they replaced stamped ones.