If you live in Santa Monica and a bridge or crown placed years ago has started to fail — loosening, a dark line at the gum, a sour taste, or a sudden crack — the next decision is rarely as simple as making a copy of the old one. What gives out is often not the porcelain but the natural tooth underneath it.
A traditional bridge suspends a replacement tooth between two crowned anchor teeth. When decay works its way under one of those crowns, or an anchor tooth cracks, the whole bridge is in trouble, and sometimes the anchor cannot be saved. A single crown can fail the same way: the cap is intact, but the tooth holding it is not.
Your options depend on what the imaging shows. If the anchor teeth are sound, a new conventional bridge may still be reasonable, and we will say so. If one or both have failed, an implant-supported bridge can span the same space using implants rather than natural teeth as the supports, so no neighboring tooth has to carry the load. For a lone failed crown, an implant may replace the tooth entirely. Where teeth have been missing beneath a bridge for many years, the bone under the gap may have thinned, and bone grafting may need to come first.
Santa Monica patients are evaluated at our Marina del Rey office on Lincoln Boulevard. Bring whatever records you have of the original work, including roughly when it was done. If the failure leaves you missing more than one tooth, the page on missing several teeth compares the paths forward.
