Surgical Bone Adhesives with Potential Maxillofacial Applications A Systematic Review

Abstract

The reduction and stabilisation of fractured bone fragments have always been a challenging task for thesurgeon. A micro-platesystem for maxillofacial fracture treatment provides excellent results. However, plates and screws are difficult toadapt to the thin bone, and small fragments often lead to the weakening of bone causing secondary fractures. Surgical bone adhesives promise as a viable alternative for issues with micro-plates, but a lotremains desired for successful usefor clinical application. The present systematic review aims to identify the bone adhesive materials available at various stages in animal or human models in the last decade and enumerate their characteristics for potential use in non-load bearing maxillofacial fractures. PubMed electronic database searched using a combination of keywords to identify English language articles between January 2011 and December 2020 yielded a total of 1204 records, of which 15 were included for final review after applying PRISMA guidelines. Cyanoacrylate was the commonly used adhesive material followed by fibrin glue and calcium phosphate-based materials. Although encouraging, results with each material still lack human randomised control trials thus presenting inconclusive evidence. Studies on these lines are suggested along with the development of newer materials to overcome the shortcomings in the currently available systems.