Effectiveness of interceptive treatment of class III malocclusions with skeletal anchorage: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Recently, new strategies for treating class III malocclusions have appeared. Skeletal anchorage appears to reduce the dentoalveolar effects while maximising the orthopaedic effect in growing patients. The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to examine the effectiveness of bone anchorage devices for interceptive treatment of skeletal class III malocclusions. Searches were made in the Pubmed, Embase, Scopus and Cochrane databases, as well as in a grey literature database, and were complemented by hand-searching. The criteria for eligibility were: patients who had undergone orthodontic treatment with skeletal anchorage (miniplates and miniscrews). Patients with syndromes or craniofacial deformities or who had undergone maxillofacial surgery were excluded. The following variables were recorded for each article: author, year of publication, type of study, sample size, dropouts, demographic variables, treatment carried out, radiographic study (2D or 3D), follow-up time, and quality of the articles on the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. The means and confidence intervals of the following variables were employed: Wits, overjet, ANB, SNA and SNB. Initially, 239 articles were identified. After removing the duplicates and applying the selection criteria, 9 were included in the qualitative synthesis and 7 in the quantitative synthesis (meta-analysis). It may be concluded that skeletal anchorage is an effective treatment for improving skeletal Class III malocclusion, but when compared with other traditional treatments such as disjunction and face mask, there is no clear evidence that skeletal anchorage improves the results.