Why You Need to Floss Around Your Dental Crown

29 September 2022
 Categories: Dentist, Blog


A dental crown sits over a damaged tooth like an armored shell of porcelain. This shell protects the fragile structure of damaged teeth. Protecting teeth with dental crowns also helps you to conserve the roots of teeth, which are crucial to preserving healthy jawbone structure. Although dental crowns don't suffer from tooth decay, keeping them and the area around them clean is important.

Flossing around your dental crown can help to prolong its life and keep harmful bacteria at bay.

Bacteria can attack the margins of dental crowns

Although a good dentist can ensure that the margin where dental crowns and teeth meet is minute, there will always be a tiny margin at the base of a dental crown. This margin is at risk of attack from oral bacteria. The best way to ensure that oral bacteria do not build up at the margin of a dental crown is to floss around the margin.

The margin of a good dental crown, which is where the crown meets the natural tooth, should be tiny. But no matter how tiny the margin is, oral bacteria are always a risk. So if you allow plaque, which contains oral bacteria, minerals, and food particles, to build up around a dental crown, eventually, those oral bacteria could find their way under the dental crown.

Bacteria can cause crown failure

If bad oral bacteria manage to enter the area below a dental crown, they will then cause tooth decay to occur under the crown. This tooth decay often goes unnoticed. By the time you notice that there is tooth decay under a dental crown, it may be too late to save the crown.

If tooth decay goes unchecked under a dental crown, then the remaining natural tooth structure will deteriorate. This is bad news since dental crowns rely on the remaining natural tooth structure for support. If the natural tooth under a crown decays, the crown covering that tooth structure will eventually fail.

Flossing around your dental crown will prevent oral bacteria from building up around it.

Be careful when flossing around your dental crown

When you finish flossing around your dental crown, take care not to tug the floss out by both ends. This could dislodge or loosen the crown. Instead, slide the floss out from between your teeth while holding just one end of the floss. That will prevent any damage from occurring to your crown.

Talk to a dentist for more information. 


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