Maxillofacial Reconstruction With Three Dimensional Resin Bone Substitutes as an Alternative to Transition Group of Metals: A Structured Review

TL;DR

This review explores the use of 3D resin bone substitutes for maxillofacial reconstruction as an alternative to metal implants.

Contribution

The paper provides a structured review of 3D resin bone substitutes for maxillofacial reconstruction, highlighting promising materials.

Findings

Polymethylmethacrylate and polylactic acid are promising resin substitutes for 3D maxillofacial reconstruction.

Only 13 studies met the inclusion criteria after a rigorous screening process.

Long-term clinical trials are needed to confirm the effectiveness of these resin substitutes.

Abstract

In recent years, novel technologies and techniques have allowed today the production of controlled architecture materials. Although autogenous bone graft substitutes remain the gold standard, enormous defects require supplementary alloplastic substitutes for reconstruction. Polymers have lately been explored for the same purpose and their biological performance has been under research since the last decade. The aim of this review is to analyse maxillofacial reconstruction with three-dimensional resin bone substitutes. A Problem Intervention Comparison Outcomes (PICO) analysis was done and a search was carried out in the Cochrane Database, PubMed, Google Scholar etc databases and a hand search was done to collect the related literature. All articles for maxillofacial reconstruction with three-dimensional resin bone substitutes were scrutinised. The manuscripts published from 1990 till May 2021, were included in this review. A total of 106 articles were obtained from a PICO-based keyword search, and 91 manuscripts were retrieved after excluding the duplicates. Out of these 57 manuscripts were excluded on the basis of title and abstract. From the remaining 34 studies, 17 were excluded after reading the full text based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. During data extraction, four studies were removed and finally, 13 studies were included in this research. From this scoping review, we could conclude that polymethylmethacrylate and polylactic acid formulations are very promising resin bone substitutes for 3-dimensional reconstruction of maxillofacial defects. However, rigorous long-term clinical trials are needed to validate this conclusion.

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