-
Review Case Reports
Thoracic complications of dental surgical procedures: hazards of the dental drill.
- E W Ely, T E Stump, A S Hudspeth, and E F Haponik.
- Department of Medicine, Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27157-1054.
- Am. J. Med. 1993 Nov 1; 95 (5): 456-65.
Case ReportsDental surgical procedures occasionally result in intrathoracic complications that may subsequently be encountered by clinicians. We report four patients with such complications, including pneumomediastinum, fatal descending necrotizing mediastinitis, and Lemierre's syndrome. In each of these patients, the commonly used dental handpiece with exhausted air directed to the working drill point was an important, but unrecognized, predisposition to their intrathoracic complication.ConclusionClinicians should be aware of the spectrum of these problems and, in particular, of the potential hazards of pressurized nonsterile air blown into open surgical sites by the dental drill.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*,_underline_or**bold**. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>and subscript<sub>text</sub>. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3., hyphens-or asterisks*. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com) - Images can be included with:
 - For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote..