An interesting article titled “Short-Term Evaluation of Gustatory Changes After Surgical Removal of Mandibular Third Molar—A Prospective Randomized Control Trial,” appears in the 2018 edition of the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (vol. 76, pp. 258-266). The article sought to explore if changes in taste occur after removing wisdom teeth.
In the article the authors discuss how damage to the lingual nerve and the loss of the ability to sense taste are complications that can occur after wisdom teeth surgery. The authors devised a study using 60 patients who had impacted wisdom teeth surgically removed. They selected 15 patients in each category of mesioangular, distoangular, horizontal, and vertical impacted wisdom teeth. The patients were evaluated with regards to taste testing before surgery and again 10 days after surgery. In the study each patient was given a sweet, salty, sour, and bitter solution brushed against the tongue. Each of the sweet, salty, sour, and bitter solutions were given in three increasing concentrations and in fact there were two different bitter solutions used. The author used a Claussen 5-Komponent-Chemo Gustometry (C5KCG) chart to aid in recording the responses to the sensations the patients noted. The authors also divided the patients into three groups based on surgical difficulty.
The authors found that 23 patients (38.3%) had an increased threshold for different taste concentrations after wisdom teeth surgery. The highest incidence of taste changes were noted mostly after removal of distoangular and vertically impacted wisdom teeth while the mesioangular and horizontally impacted wisdom teeth had less taste changes. The authors also found that the highest difficulty of extraction patients had the most increased taste threshold for taste concentrations after wisdom teeth surgery. The authors point out that none of the 23 patients with an increased threshold for taste had completely lost the sense of taste and that after three months this effect went away. The authors also found that taste changes were observed to be higher with salty and sour concentrations while sweet and bitter concentrations were less affected after surgical removal of wisdom teeth.
The authors do point out some of the limitations with their study including that measuring taste is a very subjective measure and that local anesthetics can cause nerve damage.
The authors state
“This extensive patient analysis of 4 different taste sensations indicates that suprathreshold taste changes do occur after surgical removal of an impacted mandibular third molar [wisdom tooth] with a high difficulty index score because the prevalence for altered taste sensations was high with distoangular and vertical impactions. These deficits could be the result of nerve compression laceration or stretch, which do not usually result in patient complaints and commonly are resolved within 3 months.”
The authors point out that in particular for patients that have high difficulty scores of extraction losing the ability to experience taste after wisdom teeth removal is a real possibility. Thus they feel surgeons should discuss this as a potential complication of wisdom teeth removal with their patients in addition to the more commonly discussed nerve damage such as with the lingual nerve.