Long-Term Stability of Anterior Open-Bite Therapy,
Huang GJ: In Seminars in Orthodontics Vol.8(3)162-172, 2002.
Review: Davidovitch M. Israel
www.lingualnews.com Volume 1, Number 1 - November 2002
Dear Readers of the electronic Lingual Orthodontics Journal,
As a service to you, I would like to expose you to a well written article concerning a controversial topic in clinical orthodontics. This article, itself a review, was published in the Seminars in Orthodontics series as part of a body of work dedicated to the subject of management of the vertical dimension.
I found this article particularly interesting because it concisely framed the nature of the clinical problem as well as surveyed the range of publications on the matter addressing both orthodontic and orthognathic treatment regimens.
It appears that there is not much science involved in the study of this problem. It is pointed out that many of the reports are retrospective and contain small numbers of subjects. This weakens their findings because it leaves them open to biased selection and weak statistical correlations.
The orthodontic techniques surveyed included fixed appliances, tongue cribs, functional therapy and the MEAW technique. The latter of these was given the highest marks for long-term stability.
The numerous orthodontic-orthognathic techniques reviewed suffer from the same research design shortcomings as the above mentioned orthodontic approaches. The success rates of these procedures were not found to be different than those reported in the orthodontically-based therapies. In addition, the use of rigid fixation was not found to be more stable long-term as compared to ligature fixation. The relapse suffered by each of these techniques was found to occur at different times (i.e. early post-surgical relapse with ligature fixation and late post-surgical relapse with rigid fixation).
The author points out, that based on his review of the published studies we can expect that 80% of our open-bite cases will maintain a positive over bite long-term. However, he also points out that this expectation is based on what up to now has been poor research design requiring better and further investigation.
I recommend this article to all our readers interested in this subject. Enjoy.
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