A Systematic Review and Meta Analysis of Non-Randomized Interventional Studies on the Pamidronate Treatment Efficacy for Patients with Bone Fibrous Dysplasia

Abstract

Objective: Pamidronate is one of the main therapies for Fibrous Dysplasia (FD), with documented enhancements in patients' clinical characteristics. Nevertheless, its usage has yielded inconclusive results. Therefore, this review aimed to investigate pamidronate’s impact on several clinical and biochemical outcomes in FD patients. Materials and Methods: This review was conducted under the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. MEDLINE, ProQuest, Wiley, and EBSCO search databases were used to search the literature. Risk of Bias In Non-Randomized Studies of Interventions (ROBINS-I) was applied for quality assessment of the included studies and Review Manager (RevMan) 5.4 was employed in performing the meta-analysis. Results: There are eight and seven studies used in the meta-analysis and systematic review, respectively. The results showed there are two studies with a low risk of bias and six with a moderate category. All papers included in this meta-analysis showed significant differences in the reduction of bone pain (p<0.00001) and serum alkaline phosphatase (SAP) (p=0.04) after pamidronate treatment compared to the before-treatment groups. Conclusion: The findings of this study indicated that pamidronate therapy had been proven to significantly reduce bone pain and increase SAP in FD patients. However, trials with more age-specific samples and a lower risk of bias should be carried out to determine the statistical significance of overall results.