Veneer Treatment for a Discolored Tooth — All-Ceramic Crown Retreatment

Hello, I'm Park Jonguk, director of Dream Dental Clinic.

Cosmetic dentistry for a discolored tooth

is done with one of two methods: veneers or an all-ceramic crown.

All-ceramic crowns are the more commonly used option.

This is largely because enough tooth reduction has to be done to cover the tooth color,

and because zirconia can be used for an all-ceramic crown.

Zirconia is a fairly hard, opaque material,

which makes it quite effective for covering discoloration.

The problem is that the all-ceramic crown method requires a considerable amount of tooth reduction.

If you want to treat with veneers instead, in order to reduce the amount of reduction,

using zirconia becomes somewhat difficult.

Zirconia has weak bonding strength to the tooth,

so the materials that bond well to the tooth and can be used for veneers

are mostly quite translucent,

which often makes the treatment fairly tricky.

In these cases, the veneer treatment used is feldspathic veneers.

The fabrication method is so demanding

that almost no clinics use this approach,

and only a very small number of dental technicians are capable of making them.

This patient came in for treatment

of an old all-ceramic crown and a tooth discolored by trauma.

The crown was also slightly chipped, but

the shape was quite awkward, and since the entire tooth had a single flat color and translucency,

it felt very different from the surrounding natural teeth.

Crowns generally have enough ceramic thickness

to make natural expression easy,

so it was a shame it had been made to look this awkward — it really didn't need to be.

It needed to be made natural again through retreatment.

For the discolored tooth, root canal treatment hadn't been done, but

the nerve canal had become obliterated long ago due to trauma, causing the discoloration,

and since there was a chance that root canal treatment might become necessary at some point after treating it with an all-ceramic crown,

this could become a problem, so we decided to treat it with a veneer that required less reduction instead.

We set the treatment plan for the retreatment and the veneer

and predicted the amount of tooth reduction.

For the discolored tooth's veneer treatment, we decided it would unavoidably require

a veneer with sufficient reduction.

For the retreatment, we removed the all-ceramic crown

and carried out the veneer reduction on the discolored tooth.

Now we move on to fabricating the all-ceramic crown and the veneer.

We decided to make the all-ceramic crown from zirconia,

and the veneer from feldspathic porcelain.

The zirconia crown cap is placed, along with the platinum foil used to fabricate the feldspathic veneer,

and this is the process of layering feldspathic ceramic on top, one layer at a time.

Feldspathic ceramic can be made as thin as about 0.1mm.

An opaque layer is made at 0.1mm, and the tooth color is layered on top of it.

On top of the opaque layer,

various ceramics are layered

to build up a natural tooth color.

Through the veneer treatment, the tooth was completed looking even more natural than the natural tooth.

The discoloration was covered so naturally that the discolored tooth gives off a truly natural feel.

It blends so naturally with the neighboring natural tooth

that it's hard to tell which tooth is natural and which is the veneer.

We've looked at the retreatment of this old all-ceramic crown

and the feldspathic veneer treatment of a discolored tooth.

Since 2006, Dream Dental Clinic