Pretravel advice – dentists’ approach

Abstract

Taking into consideration two main factors: the general poor condition of dental health of the population and that elderly people are becoming more and more active in traveling one can draw the conclusion that pretravel advice must contain dental issues too. Authors suggests some travel related medical problems such as infection control, a reliable dental service abroad, the proper way of cleaning teeth and prosthesis where safe water isn’t available, failures with the dentures and braces.
However the more important issue is the timing of air travel after dental interventions in order to avoid barodontalgia. Unfortunately, the international literature hardly mentions this kind of problem, although it would be useful both for dentists and for the general practitioners and travel medicine professionals. There is no evidence based rules for the optimal duration between the dental intervention and air-travel so authors collect the relevant professionals’ opinion. According to their approach the minimum waiting time should be 24 hours after filling and dental extraction, in the case of implantation without complication it is 24–48 hours, while in case of more difficult interventions connecting to implantation this time can take up to 2 weeks and root canal manipulation requires at least 72 hours but a week proved to be more safe etc.
The determining of optimal time of air travel after dental interventions requires more detailed surveys but hopefully the time-suggestions of this paper is good for a rough estimation. The exact timing should be decided by the treating doctor and it is depended on the patient’s condition and the type of the intervention.