Restoration & Fabrication

A dental bridge, otherwise known as a fixed partial denture, is a prosthesis used to replace missing teeth and is not removable by the patient. A prosthesis that is removable by the patient is called a removable partial denture. more...

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A dental bridge is fabricated by reducing the teeth on either side of the missing tooth or teeth by a preparation pattern determined by the location of the teeth and by the material from which the bridge is fabricated. In other words the abutment teeth are reduced in size to accommodate the material to be used to restore the size and shape of the original teeth in a correct alignment and contact with the opposing teeth. The dimensions of the bridge are defined by Ante's Law: "The root surface area of the abutment teeth has to equal or surpass that of the teeth being replaced with pontics" .

The materials used for the bridge include gold, porcelain fused to metal, or in the correct situation porcelain alone. The amount and type of reduction done to the abutment teeth varies slightly with the different materials used. The recipient of such a bridge must be careful to clean well under this prosthesis.

When restoring an edentulous space with a fixed partial denture that will crown the teeth adjacent to the space and bridge the gap with a pontic, or "dummy tooth", the restoration is referred to as a bridge. Besides all of the preceding information that concerns single-unit crowns, bridges possess a few additional considerations when it comes to case selection and treatment planning, tooth preparation and restoration fabrication.

Case selection and treatment planning

When a single tooth requires a crown, the prosthetic crown will in most instances rest upon whatever tooth structure was originally supporting the crown of the natural tooth. However, when restoring an edentulous area with a bridge, the bridge is almost always restoring more teeth than there are root structures to support. For instance, in the photo at right, the 5-unit bridge will only be supported on three abutment teeth. In order to determine whether or not the abutment teeth will be able to support a bridge without a virtually guaranteed failure due to lack of proper support from the remaining root structures, the dentist should employ Ante's rule, which states that the roots of the remaining abutment teeth must possess a combined total surface area in three dimensions more than that of the missing root structures that are to be restored with the bridge. When the situation yields a poor prognosis for proper support, double abutments may be required to properly conform to Ante's rule.

When a posterior tooth that is intended to become an abutment tooth already possesses an intracoronal restoration, it might be in order to make that bridge abutment into an inlay or an onlay, instead of a crown. However, this may concentrate the torque of the masticatory forces onto a less enveloping restoration, thus making the bridge more prone to failure.

Read more at Wikipedia.org