SINGLE VS SEQUENTIAL DRILLING IN IMPLANTOLOGY: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Background: Recent clinical protocols in implantology aim at shortening the treatment duration and reducing the trauma and discomfort of the surgical intervention, with good postoperative outcomes. The insertion of dental implants usually engages prior drilling procedures for making implant site. Conventionally, this drilling is done in a sequential way using gradual sizes of drills. However, sequential drilling may be timewasting and disagreeable for the patient (long intervention). Moreover, extended time of tissue exposure may be damaging for the healing response, and prolonging the exposure to the oral environment, which may produce infection. Currently, the clinical advances tend to simpler and minimally invasive procedures. In that respect, simplified drilling was proposed, which consists of minimizing the number of drills through the use of a pilot drill followed by a unique final drill or directly by using a single drill. Purpose: The aim of this study is to compare, through a systematic review of the literature, the two procedures of drilling and conclude which can lead to a better cicatrization process. Materials and method: A systematic review of the literature was conducted through the MEDLINE (PubMed) database between from 03/01/2009 to 03/01/2019. The following combination of MeSH terms was used in PubMed: single drilling AND dental implant. Then a hand search was performed in Ebsco database. Two independent reviewers achieved the quality assessment of the articles retained and two other authors achieved screening, data abstraction and writing of the review. Results: Most of the studies included in our review concluded no statistically significant differences between singleand sequential drilling, and stated that both of them are viable options. Conclusion: Within the limitations of our review, it can be concluded that implant placement using a single bur method, is a reliable technique allowing the same outcomes as the conventional approach. Additionally, it allows decreasing the treatment?s cost and duration.