Management of Mandibular Fractures Using Locking and Nonlocking Miniplates.

PURPOSE: The study proposed to determine the superiority between locking plate and nonlocking miniplate for mandibular fractures (MFs) treatment.

METHODS

A comprehensive electronic search examining Medline-Ovid, Embase, and PubMed databases language without date was performed in February 2018. Inclusion criteria were studies in humans, including randomized controlled trials, controlled clinical trials, with the aim of comparing the 2 techniques. The quality of studies was assessed, and the relative risk (RR) with its corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) was assessed to measure the effect size.

RESULTS

Thirteen publications were enrolled into the analysis. The results showed that there were significant differences in overall complications (RR, 0.62; 95% CI, 0.351-1.094; P = 0.06), postoperative infection (RR, 0.503, 95% CI, 0.223-1.136) when comparing locking miniplates with nonlocking miniplates in treating mandible fractures. The incidence of malocclusion showed a statistically significant difference in the outcome favoring locking miniplates (fixed: RR, 0.503; 95% CI, 0.125-2.030; P = 0.06). In addition, the use of locking miniplates had a lower postoperative maxillomandibular fixation rate than the use of nonlocking miniplates (RR, 0.414; 95% CI, 0.196-0.872; P = 0.002).

CONCLUSION

The result of meta-analysis revealed that use of locking plate is superior to the nonlocking plate in the reducing of postoperative complication rates in the management of MFs.