Wisdom Teeth

Loss of Vision After Tooth Extraction

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An interesting article titled “A case report on loss of vision secondary to odontogenic orbital cellulitis” appears in Advances in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery written by A. Ghaesemi and H. Jones (vol. 4, 2021). The article discusses a case of a woman who lost vision after having a tooth extracted. In the article a discussion is made of a 54 year old woman who went to the hopsital after experiencing three days of left-sided periorbital swelling, nasal discharge, and increasing facial pain. She began to experience these symptoms after having a symptomatic tooth removed. When she arrived at the emergency department she had a left eye that was protruding with extensive conjunctival hyperemia, had restricted eye movements, had a rapid heartbeat, and said that she was increasingly having bluriness in her left eye. A few hours later she lost her … Read more

Pediatric Dental Patients Regularly have Adverse Events

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An interesting article titled “Children Experience Notable Number of Adverse Events During Dental Care” was presented on July 23, 2021, at the virtual session of the 2021  International Association for Dental Research (IADR)/AADR/CADR General Session written by William Nicola and et al. The research set to investigate how common adverse events are for children who receive dental care in the United States. An adverse event is an unfavorable and generally unforeseen incident caused by an error or omission during treatment that has negative consequences for health. Children are believed to suffer more commonly from adverse events than adults because they do not alwasy cooperate and they often can not sit still. The authors had sent out an online anonymous survey to 6,327 active members of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (AAPD) in late 2019. The survey consisted of 13 … Read more

Assessing the Impact of Three Day Opioids Limits for Dentists

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An interesting article titled “Opioid Formulary Edit’s Impact on Commercial Dental Prescribers” was presented on July 23, 2021, at the virtual session of the 2021 International Association for Dental Research (IADR)/AADR/CADR General Session written by David Hamlin and et al. The research set to investigate the impact the insurance company Cigna had when it implemented its three-day quantity limit on dental opioid prescriptions. Insurance companies limiting new opioid prescriptions for dentists to three days (or another time duration) has been discussed on this site before in the post Insurance Companies Limiting Access to Opioids After Wisdom Teeth Surgery. The authors speculated that by limiting opioid prescriptions to three day there would be year-over-year reductions in prescriptions greater than three days and reductions in the average total metric quantity per prescription. In the study, the authors looked at the claims of … Read more

Recommendations on Accidental Displacement of a Wisdom Tooth

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One of the complications associated with wisdom teeth removal is the accidental displacement of the wisdom tooth. This has been discussed in the post Computer Assisted Retrieval of Accidentally Displaced Wisdom Teeth and as a complication over at http://www.teethremoval.com/complications.html. There are many places in the human body a wisdom tooth can end up in accidentally during surgery such as the maxillary sinus, submandibular space, sublingual space, infratemporal fossa, lateral pharyngeal space, and pterygomandibular space. In an article titled “Accidental displacement of third molars; report of three cases, review of literature and treatment recommendation” written by Anand and Patel appearing in Oral Surgery in 2013 (vol. 6, pp. 2-8) a discussion is made of three cases of displacement of a wisdom tooth during tooth extraction along with treatment recommendations. In the article the authors describe the most common sites of displacement … Read more

Tooth bud abalation of wisdom teeth may be alternative to surgery in the future

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An interesting article titled “Fully Guided Third Molar Tooth Bud Ablation in Pigs,” appears in the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery written by Leigh E. Colby (2022, pp. 1-12). The article describes the investigation of ablated wisdom tooth buds in pigs which may one day serve as an alternative to surgical extraction. In the study the author conducted a mandibular split-mouth animal pig study that compared right lower wisdom tooth with left unablated wisdom tooth buds. The left unablated tooth buds were used as the control group. The author stated that pigs were chosen as their wisdom tooth bud development resembles that of humans. Further pigs that were 20 weeks old were chosen as they have wisdom tooth buds that are similar in dimension to humans. A total of 5 female pigs were used that were acquired in Oregon. … Read more