EXTERNAL FIXATION GREATLY IMPROVES

OUTCOMES IN THE SURGICAL TREATMENT OF

OSTEORADIONECROSIS OF THE JAWS
WITHOUT AFFECTING QUALITY OF LIFE: A
FIVE-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE STUDY
• Author :Nima Mahdian Et Al
• Bjoms
• Department Of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, First Faculty Of
Medicine, Charles University And The General University Hospital,
Prague, Czech Accepted 22 May 2020
Introduction
• Osteoradionecrosis (ORN) of the jaws is a severe complication of
radiotherapy to the head and neck that presents as a chronic non-healing
lesion, specifically defined as “exposed irradiated bone that fails to heal over
a period of 3 months without evidence of persisting or recurrent tumor”
• External fixation is a method of splinting the mandible, using pin fixation. It
is minimally invasive and is even suitable for use in children. It is not used on
a large scale today, but it does have a number of special indications for use
in the mandible, including in stabilization of injuries (such as comminuted
fractures or gunshot wounds with large areas of soft tissue damage) treating
pathological fractures in ORN and medication-related osteonecrosis of the
jaws; tumors
• osteomyelitis; or excision of large cysts. It is also useful for temporary
bridging ofresected defects untilsecondary reconstruction can take place. 2
It is this last use that we explore here.
• Today, much emphasisis being placed on the evaluation of patients’ quality
of life (QoL)
• In this study, they use QoL a term to describe the subjective state of
wellbeing of the patient who has ORN, compared with their perceived state
during the healing period while they wore the external fixator.
• They generated a short questionnaire, based on the Oral Health Impact
Profile, with visual analogue scales (VAS) for the various physical,
psychological, and social factors that contribute to the overall QoL.
Materials and methods