Abstract

This study analyzed the incidence of wound infection after the operation of mandibular third molar extraction in relation with antibiotic prophylaxis with the object of young and healthy patients. The study object was 1,177 mandibular third molars of 850 men of 20 to 25 years old without any specific systemic disease. Three methods of preventive antibiotic medication were selected according to the preventive antibiotic medication previously reported; three experimental groups were selected based on them, and the antibiotic used was amoxicillin( Kymoxin, Yuhanyanghaeng, Seoul). The group 1 includes the patients that took the antibiotic orally before the operation(one hour earlier, 500mg) and for three days after the operation(250mg per time, three times/day), the group 2 is the ones that took the same antibiotic orally only once about one hour before the operation(500mg), and the group 3 did not take any antibiotics before and after the operation. And to compare the difficulties and the degrees of extraction during operations which can be possibly related to the wound infection after the operations, the mandibular third molars’impacted depths and extraction methods were investigated as well. To check if the wound was infected, observations with an internal of one week were performed twice after the operation, and the meaningfulness of the infection incidence was verified through Chi-square test using SPSS program(SPSS Inc., IL, USA). There was no statistically significant difference between the antibiotic medication methods and the wound infection incidence after the operation among the experimental groups. As examining the relations between the mandibular third molar operation methods and the wound infection incidence after the operation, there existed a statistically meaningful difference in the infection incidence according to the operation methods(p=0.020). And there was no statistically significant difference in the wound infection incidence according to the impacted depth of the mandibular third molar. Therefore, it is thought that there exists little necessity of prophylatic antibiotics medication when extracting the mandibular third molar of young and healthy men without any systemic disease in general; however, in case when it is expected that the possibility of infection will be high or the wound on the tissue will be severe, it is sure that the prophylactic antibiotics medication will be necessary.