Mohammed El-Maaytah | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Experience versus complication rate in third molar surgery.

OBJECTIVES: The records of 1087 patients who underwent surgical removal of third molar teeth were prospectively examined to analyse the possible relationship between postoperative complications and the surgeon's experience parameter. METHOD AND MATERIALS: Seven surgeons (three specialists in surgical dentistry [specialists SD] and four oral and maxillofacial Senior House Officers [OMFS residents]) carried out the surgical procedures. For each patient, several variables were recorded including age, gender, radiographic position of extracted teeth, treating surgeon, duration of surgery and postoperative complications. RESULTS: Analysis of the data revealed some differences in the incidence of complications produced by the specialists SD and OMFS residents. The main statistically relevant differences were increase the incidences of trismus, nerve paraesthesia, alveolar osteitis and infection in the resident-treated group, while the specialist-treated group showed higher rates of post-operative bleeding. CONCLUSION: The higher rate of postoperative complications in the resident-treated group suggests that at least some of the complications might be related to surgical experience. Further work needs to compare specialists of training programmes with different years of experience, using large cross - sectional studies.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2005

Assessing the relationship between concentrations of malodor compounds and odor scores from judges.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this review was to assess the relationship between mean organoleptic scores (using a 0-to-5 scale) and concentrations of putative odorants representative of those thought to be important in oral malodor, as well as to propose a simple model that explains the dose-response curves obtained from a group of odor judges. METHODS: The model assumes that the scale is rooted at the detection threshold (0), the maximum score (5) is fully saturating and the brain and olfactory nervous system can act as a faithful transducer of the state of binding (occupancy) of the smell receptors in the nose. The authors predicted that the response would be exponential or sigmoidal in nature. They tested this using published empirical data based on seven odor judges and eight odor compounds. RESULTS: Analysis of the data by different plotting methods showed the odorants to be significantly different from each other (P < .01 by regression analysis) with regard to thresholds and slopes. The lower the threshold, the stronger the inherent odor of the compound. The greater the slope, the greater the odor power. Volatile sulfur compounds had low smell thresholds and high odor power and were highly volatile, while indole was less volatile but had a very low threshold. Both compounds may be significant in human oral malodor. CONCLUSIONS: The authors found that the organoleptic scale was exponential in practice. These findings imply that when inhibitory agents are tested against odor-generating bacteria, a given percentage inhibition of the volatile compound production rate by a treatment (such as an antimicrobial mouthwash) will result in an equal incremental reduction on the scale, regardless of the starting position on the scale. Understanding the scale enables dental professionals to develop better ways of training, calibrating and standardizing odor judges, along with better ways of designing clinical trials and interpreting data regarding the efficacy of antiodor treatments.

Breath Tests↗