Efficacy of Buccal Fat Pad and Nasolabial Flap in Management of Oral Submucous Fibrosis: A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND- Oral submucous fibrosis (OSMF) is a potentially malignant disorder of the oral cavity. The surgical management of this condition involves excision of the fibrotic bands and interpositional grafts to retain the increased oral opening. Various procedures and graft material have been utilized with differing success rates. OBJECTIVE - is to collect and analyze from world literature two different technique that is the buccal fat pad and nasolabial flap in the surgical management of OSMF. The reasons for the choice of a particular surgical procedure, the study protocol, the average follow-up period and the results were analyzed. STUDY ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA- Inclusion criteria includes articles in English literature, articles published between from Jan 2000 to Dec 2017, RCT, and clinical trials. Exclusion criteria includes reviews, case reports, letters, abstracts, editorials, historical reviews and in vitro studies, full text articles not available in spite of writing to authors. MATERIALS AND METHODS- The PRISMA protocol was followed for the systematic review. Search engines and medical databases like PubMed, Google Institutional Library was conducted. The search words OSMF, Buccal fat pad, nasolabial flap, interincisal opening, were used for retrieval of data. RESULTS- The review resulted in a total of 3 articles. A total of 78 surgically treated cases were included in the analysis. The choice of procedure seems to be determined entirely by the preference of the surgeon. This review shows that buccal fat pad offers better interincisal opening than nasolabial flap as seen in all the three articles.