Effectiveness of systemic antibiotic prophylaxis with amoxicillin in preventing postoperative infectious complications after impacted third molar surgery: a systematic review of randomized clinical trials

Purpose: The removal of third molars is one of the most common procedures in oral surgery and inflammatory and infectious complications have been vastly documented in the literature.

Despite the efforts of researchers, there is no consensus regarding the benefit of systemic antibiotics in preventing these complications.

Discrepancies between studies are enhanced because they differ substantially in their design, the outcome variables assessed, schedule and route of administration, dose and type of antibiotic.

The purpose of this systematic review is to determine the effects of antibiotic prophylaxis with amoxicillin in the incidence of surgical site infection and alveolar osteitis following third molar surgery in order to justify or refute a measure widespread both public and private health.

Materials and methods: It was designed a search strategy applicable to the various databases queried. Hand searching was conducted and we searched for ongoing trials.

We included randomized clinical trials of amoxicillin preoperative, postoperative and comparison of antibiotic regimens.

Results: We found 34,826 articles. Of them, 28 were classified as potentially eligible, but finally we selected 6 studies. The included studies found no statistically significant differences between the groups, except for one where amoxicillin was effective in reducing pain and infection in patients 15 years old. However, their low methodological quality precludes consideration of these results.

Conclusions: According to this review we cannot support or refute the use of amoxicillin prophylaxis in third molar surgery, due to the low internal validity of studies. We suggest the need to generate higher quality research.

Conflict of interest: None declared.

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Jan 27, 2018 | Posted by in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery | Comments Off on Effectiveness of systemic antibiotic prophylaxis with amoxicillin in preventing postoperative infectious complications after impacted third molar surgery: a systematic review of randomized clinical trials

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