A Radiological and Histological Evaluation on the Effects of Cortical Perforations on Bone Healing in Mandibular Onlay Graft Procedures

This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of cortical perforations on bone healing inmandibular onlay graft procedures radiologically and histologically.In this study, augmentation with cortical autogeneous bone grafts were applied to 7 adult pigs.The left and the right mandibular sides of the pigs were defined as the experimental andcontrol groups, respectively. On the experiemental group, before graft fixation, perforationswere performed in the recipient site cortical bone. On the control group, autograft fixationwas applied to the recipient site without any perforations.After a healing period of 12 weeks, pigs were sacrified and grafted sites were resected.Radiological and than histopatological evaluations were perfomed on these resected sites.In the radiological evaluation, there was no statistically significant difference between theexperimental and the control groups (p>0.05). On the other hand, according to the results ofhistological evaluation, there was a significant difference in the thickness of the graftsbetween the experimental and the control groups (p<0.05). However, when the remodelizationon the upper and lower half of the recipient site and osteoblastic activity in the grafts werecarried out, no significant difference was observed between the experimental and the controlgroups (p>0.05).As a result, in augmentation procedure with mandibular onlay bone grafts, corticalperforations in the recipient site have no distinctive contribution to bone healing in twelveweeks.Key Words: cortical perforation, autogenous bone graft, guided bone regeneration