Dental Case Study: Upper Crowns and Bridge Restoration

Patient History

In this dental case study, we see a person who was born with a cleft palate. Oftentimes people with cleft palates are born without some of their front teeth. This person is no exception he is missing his top left lateral incisor. He had been through braces with a great orthodontist here in Chattanooga. The before pictures are shown below are after the braces came off.

Dental Treatment Performed

The orthodontic treatment performed did many great things for this patient there are limits to what braces alone can do. In this case, we had some tooth size discrepancy and the patient is only hitting on his right side with two pre-molars. All the other teeth did not touch the opposing tooth. As a result chewing food was very difficult. With the teeth not touching and a stable plane of occlusion (bite) needed the patient and his parents choose to do crowns on all the upper teeth. This was a good decision because then the patient didn’t need restorations on the lower but would have the benefit of a good stable bite.

To start this case we did a scan with our Trios scanner of the patient’s teeth. This captures not only the teeth but also the way their teeth come together. Then what we call a diagnostic wax-up is done. This is a process where we make the teeth in wax look like we think the final teeth should look like. It is pictured below. The temporaries were duplicates of the diagnostic wax-up. This was the patient is able to “test drive” if you will the final restorations before they are permanent. If changes are needed we can make them in the temporary stage. In this case, we figured out the front teeth needed to be a little longer than the temporaries were, this change was made in the final crowns.

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