The Therapeutic Effectiveness Using Fluorescence-Guided Surgery for MRONJ

Long-term application of antiresorptive and/or antiangiogenic agents may cause oral disorders, including medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (MRONJ), which remains an incurable disease. Surgical treatment can help alleviate infection of the jaw and block the progress of the disease, but postoperative recurrence is often caused by incomplete resection of necrotic bone during surgery. The traditional method for determining the boundary of necrotic bone resection is primarily based on the color, geology, and microcirculation-based bleeding state according to the bone tissue, which is easily affected by the surgeon's clinical experience and can cause insufficient resection of osteonecrosis bone. Recent studies have proposed using fluorescence technology-assisted necrotic bone resection.

Systematic literature review was conducted to evaluate the therapeutic effectiveness of fluorescence-guided MRONJ surgery.

PubMed/MedLine, Scopus, and Web of Science databases were searched from inception to February 7, 2022. Randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies were evaluated according to the Cochrane risk of bias tool ROB 2, and non-RCT (N-RCT) studies were evaluated according to the ROBINS-I tool.

A total of 6 articles were included in the systematic review, including 4 N-RCT studies (1 retrospective study and 3 prospective studies) and 2 RCT studies, with 240 patients and 280 MRONJ lesions. The vast majority of studies were with moderate risk of bias, and the quality of the evidence was moderate.

Evidence of moderate strength suggests that fluorescence-assisted techniques effectively determine the bone resection boundaries in MRONJ surgery. However, whether the prognosis of patients treated with fluorescence-guided surgery is significantly better than that of traditional surgery must be proved by randomized controlled studies with larger sample sizes and higher quality.