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SAN FRANCISCO – As scary as it may sound, a root canal is a fairly common dental procedure. But for a 60-year-old man, the procedure put his life at risk when he developed meningitis, a swelling of the tissues surrounding his brain and spinal cord. Even more surprising, however, was that this dangerous result was not due to a horrific slip of the dentist's burr or a germ-covered dental instrument. Indeed, the procedure has taken place without a hitch.
Several days after the intervention, the man arrived in a New Jersey emergency room with fever, headaches and neck pain. He informed the doctors of his recent root canal and also said that his dentist had asked him to take amoxicillin – a common antibiotic – several days before the procedure.
Because of his symptoms, doctors suspected that he was suffering from meningitis, which is almost always caused by an infection. So they started taking antibiotics, but it only got worse. [27 Oddest Medical Cases]
It was then that the doctors who treated him suspected meningitis of drug origin or symptoms of meningitis not due to infection, but to a specific drug. And in this case, the drug was amoxicillin.
Dr. Maria Nagori, an infectious disease physician at the Geisinger Community Medical Center in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who treated the patient in 2017, is very rare. "It's so rare, I've never heard of it before," said Nagori, who was on a scholarship at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, NJ, at the time.
After further research, Nagori found that only a dozen cases of amoxicillin-induced meningitis had been reported.
Nagori presented the case report of the man here on Oct. 4 at IDWeek, a meeting of several organizations focused on infectious diseases. The report has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
When various infection tests became negative, the doctors stopped the antibiotic treatment of the man and this one started to get better. At a follow-up visit, he was fine, Nagori told Live Science.
After further interrogation, the doctors learned that the man had already developed meningitis twice: in 2011 and in 2015. Each time, his meningitis symptoms appeared after taking amoxicillin before a dental procedure. But as this man had been treated in several different hospitals and that it was a rare side effect, no one established a link with amoxicillin before his treatment in 2017.
In addition, the man did not suffer from any health problem or any risk factor that would have prompted him to need antibiotics before a dental procedure, such as a canal. root, said Nagori, which means that antibiotics are useless.
Nagori and her colleagues advised the patient not to take amoxicillin again. Instead, he could take the antibiotic clindamycin.
Originally published on Science live.
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