As discussed before on this website, having a wisdom tooth extracted can in rare instances lead to death. This is expanded on over at the wisdom teeth death page http://www.teethremoval.com/death.html. At the time of writing this, at least 67 deaths have been listed on this page attributable to wisdom teeth removal.
In a recent case a 74 year old man has passed away in Japan after having a mandibular wisdom tooth extracted. A case report of this is described in Wataru Kawashima, Katsuhiko Hatake, Yoshifumi Morimura, Risa Kudo, Mari Nakanishi, Shigehiro Tamaki, Shogo Kasuda, Katsuya Yuui, and Akiko Ishitani, “Asphyxial death related to postextraction hematoma in an elderly man,” Foresnic Science International, vol. 288, e47-e49, 2013. In the article the authors describe how after having wisdom teeth extracted it is possible to develop bleeding. In some cases massive bleeding and hematoma formation can occur. It has been suggested that such bleeding is due to damage to the arterial branches during tooth extraction. I have described some such cases over on the complications page at http://www.teethremoval.com/complications.html.
In the case report the 74 year old man called his daughter 10 hours after having the wisdom tooth extracted due to shortness of breath (dyspnea). She found him unconscious and he was immediately transferred to a hospital. He was in a coma for 7 days before dieing. His cause of death was asphyxia resulting from airway obstruction that was caused by both deviation of the epiglottis and compression of the trachea due to cervical subcutaneous bleeding that resulted from postextraction bleeding.
The authors state that the fracture of the lingual side of the alveolar bone could result in massive bleeding. Since the mandibular bone and lingual side of the mandibular molar site are heavily vascularized regions it is likely that arterial damage occurred and led to massive bleeding. The authors also believed that hypertension which was caused by postextraction pain and a bleeding tendency due to liver cirrhosis contributed to the continuous bleeding. The authors also believe the bleeding flowed into the submandibular space and caused a hematoma formation.
The authors state
“In elderly patients, fracture of the alveolar bone…occurs more frequently during tooth extraction because of the firm adhesion between the roots of the teeth and the alveolar bone. Elderly patients, particularly with abnormal hemostatic mechanisms, may experience a fatal course, even with minimally invasive surgery, such as tooth extraction.”
This is quite scary, although there are a lot of factors for the man’s death, any person who under goes wisdom tooth extraction must be well informed about the risks of this operation.