The work selected for this review was found by using the search terms “osseous surgery” and “periodontal pockets” using the PubMed search engine and filtering to obtain results from the last five years. The article, published in the Journal of Clinical Periodontology and written by Ferrarotti et al. (2020), is titled “Pocket elimination after osseous resective surgery: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” Ferrarotti et al. (2020) set out to evaluate the clinical efficacy of osseous resective surgery (ORS) in treating residual periodontal pocket elimination (RPPE) and its health impacts on the chronic periodontitis patients. The study design encompasses elements of meta-analysis of randomized control trials and a systematic review.
For this purpose, the authors researched clinical studies that monitored patients’ states post-surgery. Ferrarotti et al. (2020) reviewed 53 full-text pieces and then performed a quantitative synthesis of the final three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) using random-effects meta-analysis. The meta-analysis demonstrated that the weighted mean (WM) of RPPE one year post-surgery comprised 98.3%, the WM resected bone volume was 0.87 mm, and the WM gain in gingival recession constituted 2.13 mm (Ferrarotti et al., 2020). Thus, Ferrarotti et al. (2020) contend that ORS’s success should be evaluated by assessing RPPE, concluding that it is a practical approach to eliminate pockets in the short-to-medium term. However, despite having a vast initial pool of available articles, the authors only included three studies, which may not be sufficient for a comprehensive meta-analysis. Moreover, the authors acknowledge that most of the evidence was gathered from the same authors, which may thus render the outcomes prone to personal bias.
Nonetheless, such a meticulous review process may also be a strength since it demonstrates high standards of allowable data. The strength of this research is also in the explicit bias and quality assessments performed by researchers. Lastly, the authors compare conventional ORS and fiber retention techniques and find that ORS is more effective in biological costs but equally successful for pocket elimination. Given the reliability of the analytical approach, the authors’ conclusion may be valid, but further research should nonetheless be included. It would be helpful for this study to address the fact that the fiber retention technique is just as effective in eliminating the pockets to make their conclusions more definitive.
Reference
Ferrarotti, F., Giraudi, M., Citterio, F., Fratini, A., Gualini, G., Piccoli, G. M., Mariani, G. M., Romano, F., & Aimetti, M. (2020). Pocket elimination after osseous resective surgery: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Periodontology, 47(6), 756–767. Web.