Dental Management of the Organ Transplant Patients

Every year, more than 28,000 transplantation procedures are performed in the United States to replace solid organs, including the heart, intestine, kidney, liver, lung, and pancreas. Patients with conditions including end-stage renal disease, severe diabetes, advanced heart disease, and liver disease may undergo transplant procedures. Because advances in medical techniques and drug therapy have extended lives of organ transplant recipients, you may treat some of these patients in your practice.

 Organ transplant patients need specialized dental care. The compromised health and immune system of patients place them at increased risk for systemic as well as oral infections. This fact must be considered when planning dental treatment before and after transplantation and requires consultation with your patient’s physician.

Tooth Infection Kills Unemployed Man!

An unemployed man died last week because he couldn't afford treatment for his infected third molar, according to news reports.
Citing physicians and family remembers, Cincinnati's WLWT television station said the infection killed 24-year-old Kyle Willis when it spread from his tooth to his brain.
Dentists advised Willis, the nephew of funk bass player Bootsy Collins, to have the tooth extracted 2 weeks earlier, but Willis had no insurance and decided to wait, according to the report.

"He should have gone to the dentist to take care of the toothache, and it wouldn't have escalated to this. It's a lesson learned by all," said Willis' aunt, Patti Collins.
Suffering from headaches and swelling, Willis later visited an emergency department, where he got prescriptions for antibiotics and analgesics.

Rinse By Chlorhexidine Do Not Help Caries

Chlorhexidine and thymol in a varnish can prevent root caries, but chlorhexidine rinse is probably useless against caries of all kinds. This finding is perhaps the biggest surprise in a comprehensive review of nonfluoride caries-preventive agents performed by a panel of the American Dental Association (ADA) and published in summary in the September issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association, with a more detailed report available on the organization's Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry Web site.

"We are moving toward management of caries as a chronic condition, rather than putting in a filling and watching until it breaks," Michael Rethman, DDS, lead author of the review and vice president for scientific research at the ADA foundation.