Dental deaths in Italy as reported by online press articles

Abstract

Objectives Mortality on the dental chair is a rare and underreported event. This study aimed to identify all deaths that occurred during dental procedures in Italy. Methods We searched PubMed/Medline, Scopus, and Internet archives looking for patients who died before, during, or after a dental procedure in Italy from 1990 to 2019. Results All the 36 identified fatal events were reported by national or regional newspapers, and none was reported by scientific databases. Interestingly, no cases regarding patients ≤16 years old were found and there was no variation in the number of reported deaths over the years. Most of the cases (n = 29) occurred in out‐of‐hospital private dental offices. Tooth extraction represented the most frequent culprit operation (39%), while myocardial infarction (28%) was the leading cause of death, followed by cardiac arrest (25%), allergies (11%), and infections (8%). In four cases, death was preprocedural, in 10 intraprocedural and in 21 postprocedural. In 17 cases, a temporal association between injection of anesthesia/sedation and death was observed. Conclusion This is the first report on Italian dental procedure‐related deaths. Most of these deaths were only temporally associated with a dental procedure and could not to be attributed to malpractice.