Dental procedure profiles under general anesthesia in special care patients

Patients with special healthcare needs may require dental treatment under general anesthesia when conventional care cannot be completed safely. Evidence from adolescent and adult special care populations remains limited. This study characterized tooth-level procedure counts and examined their distribution across age groups and overlapping diagnostic domains. This retrospective observational study included all consecutive eligible general anesthesia episodes among patients aged ≥ 13 years at a tertiary dental center in Türkiye between January 2020 and December 2025. Restorations, root-canal treatments, and extractions involving permanent teeth were counted, with the treatment episode as the unit of analysis. Age groups were compared using the Kruskal–Wallis test followed by Dunn’s test with Bonferroni correction. The 20 exploratory comparisons involving non-mutually exclusive diagnostic domains were adjusted using the Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate procedure. A sensitivity analysis included only the first eligible episode per patient. Of 104 screened episodes, 83 episodes from 79 patients were included; 75 patients contributed one episode and four contributed two. The mean age was 29.1 ± 11.6 years. Overall, 1,000 tooth-level procedures were recorded: 535 restorations, 111 root canal treatments, and 354 extractions. The mean total procedure count was 12.0 ± 6.2 per episode. Restorative procedure counts differed across age groups ( p = 0.005). The 13–19-year group underwent an estimated five more restorations than the 40–49-year group (95% confidence interval: 2–8; Bonferroni-adjusted p = 0.017). Total procedure, root canal treatment, and extraction counts did not differ significantly across age groups. The genetic/syndromic/metabolic domain showed a nominal association with restorative procedure count (unadjusted p = 0.038), but not after false discovery rate correction (adjusted p = 0.486); no diagnostic-domain comparison remained significant. The first-episode sensitivity analysis ( n = 79) yielded the same overall interpretation. General anesthesia-supported dental care commonly involved multiple permanent teeth, with restorations accounting for the largest proportion of procedures. Restorative counts differed across age groups, whereas broad diagnostic domains did not distinguish treatment profiles after correction for multiple comparisons. These descriptive associations should be interpreted within the broader clinical context.