Has the FDA Warning for Children Under Three Affected General Anesthesia Use in Dentistry?

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An interesting article titled “Prolonged General Anesthesia in a Pediatric Population” was presented on July 21, 2021, at the virtual session of the 2021 International Association for Dental Research (IADR)/AADR/CADR General Session written by Mary Younan and et al. The research sets to investigate if use of prolonged general anesthesia amongst pediatric dental patients has changed since 2016 when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came out with guidance that said 3 or more hours of anesthetic exposure, may be a risk factor for cognitive defects, particularly for pediatric patients under 3 years of age. The researchers attempeted to see if a difference exists in the proportion of pediatric dental cases with general anesthesia time 180 minutes pre-FDA to post-FDA warning and to use a root cause analysis to identify factors that contribute to prolonged general anestehsia exposure of children … 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

3D Printed Models for Wisdom Teeth Surgery Planning

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An interesting article titled “Physical Simulation Models in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery: A New Concept in 3-Dimensional Modeling for Removal of Impacted Third Molars,” written by Cervenka et al. appears in the 2019 edition of the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. The article describes creating three-dimensional (3D) printed models for wisdom teeth surgery planning for particular use in residency training. The authors discuss how advances in 3D design and printing along with decreases in costs are making the use of surgical simulation models an option for clinical training. This can have particular use with residency training because of caps on the amount of hours residents can work and increasingly patients not wanting residents to participate in their surgeries. In the article the authors present a design and fabrication of a reusable 3D printed lower jaw model with a reconfigurable … Read more