Dental Anesthesia May Stop the Development of Wisdom Teeth

An interesting study appears in the April 2013, JADA which looks at whether dentists giving inferior alveolar nerve blocks to young children may be stopping wisdom teeth from later developing. The article is titled “Inferior alveolar nerve block and third-molar agenesis: A retrospective clinical study,” and by Jerry Swee and et al., JADA, April 2013, vol. 144, issue 4, pp. 389-395.

In the study the researchers looked at children who had received inferior alveolar nerve block (a local anesthesia) between the years of 2 and 6 at the Tufts dental clinic and also had a dental x-ray taken 3 years or after of being initially treated. The researchers arrived at 439 potential wisdom tooth sites from 220 patient records for their analysis.

The control group consisted of 376 potential wisdom tooth sites where it was clear that the child never received anesthesia on the lower jaw near where the wisdom tooth could later develop. The other 63 potential wisdom tooth sites made up the study group.

The researchers found that in the control group 1.9% of the potential wisdom tooth sites had x-ray evidence of no wisdom tooth buds. On the other hand, in the study group 7.9% of the potential wisdom tooth sites had no wisdom tooth buds. A wisdom tooth in development is called a bud and is tiny and only covered by a thin layer of soft tissue. It often emerges between the ages of 2 and 6. These buds don’t usually emerge into the late teens or into early adulthood.

A wisdom tooth bud is close to where a needle penetrates when routine dental anesthesia is injected in the lower jaw which is often done when treating cavities. Hence, this study shows that those children who had a local anesthesia in the lower jaw were over 4 times more likely to not have wisdom tooth buds when compared to children who had never received local anesthesia. This was a statistically significant finding.

Additional studies with larger samples sizes and longer study times will be able to help determine if these results are applicable to the entire population. Clearly these results suggest that it may be possible to prevent wisdom teeth from developing by altering their course in young childhood.

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