My gum has become darker after having a crown fitted on my front tooth

Q. I currently have a crown fitted to my front tooth and the nerve has been removed. Over time the gum is beginning to darken and not look very good. Is there any procedure to turn the gum back to its usual colour? Thanks C

A . Dear C,

This can be a difficult problem to treat. It can be due to 2 possible causes ( and sometimes a combination of the 2) :

1. Most commonly it is due to the toot underneath being dark and showing through the gum. This makes the gum have a blue hue. The usual treatment is to replace the crown, tucking the margin of the crown further underneath the gum to cover over the darkened root and/or bleaching the internal surface of the root via the root canal to lighten the tooth.

2. The gum sometimes can become tattooed by the metal in the existing crown. In this case simply trimming the tattooed gum away can lead to an overly long tooth. The better but more complicated way is to extrude the tooth ( make the tooth grow down). The gum grows down too and the excess can then be trimmed back to match the level of the adjacent tooth, so removing the dark gum. A new crown would then be made.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Dr Julian Caplan BDS
Director on the board of the British Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry
Aviva Cosmetic Dentistry

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This post was published on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 4:54 pmand is filed under Dr Caplan's Answers, Experts Answers, Q. Dental crowns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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