In the United States, the standard of care for rigid fixation in orthognathic surgery is titanium plates and screws. This hardware is meant to remain implanted indefinitely, but the potential for hardware removal is always mentioned in preoperative discussions. The incidence of titanium hardware removal after orthognathic surgery has been reported to range from 0.4% to 27%, and the largest study previously published included 570 patients over 5 years.1,2 The purpose of this study is to examine the incidence of titanium hardware removal after orthognathic surgery over a 20-year period and to identify factors associated with removal. A retrospective study was performed involving subjects who underwent orthognathic surgery including a combination of Le Fort osteotomy, bilateral sagittal split osteotomy, genioplasty, subapical osteotomy, and vertical ramus osteotomy. The primary outcome variable was titanium hardware removal. Other predictor variables included age, sex, simultaneous removal of third molars, simultaneous bone grafting, and medical comorbidities. Patients met inclusion criteria if they had undergone orthognathic surgery with titanium fixation at a single institution by a single surgeon between the years of 2000 and 2020. Patients with cleft and craniofacial syndromes and those fixated with resorbable hardware were excluded. A total of 738 patients met inclusion criteria with 1,483 orthognathic surgery procedures performed. The mean age at the time of surgery was 23.2 years, and 57% of subjects were female. Ultimately, 43 of the 738 patients required hardware removal (5.8% of patients), and 48 of the 1,483 procedures resulted in hardware removal (3.4%). The average time to hardware removal was 2.3 years (ranging 6 weeks to 9.7 years) with a median of 1.3 years. The most common indication for removal was surgical site infection (17 patients), followed by palpable, painful hardware (12 patients), exposed hardware (6 patients), maxillary sinusitis (4 patients), adjacent tooth external root resorption (1 patient), loose hardware (1 patient), prophylactic removal after previous infection (1 patient), and thermal sensitivity (1 patient). Patients who required hardware removal were more often female (69.8%), were older (average 29.9 years), and were more likely to have multiple jaws operated (79.1%). Of the 43 patients with hardware removed, 19 had hardware removed from the mandible (44.2%), 18 from the maxilla (41.9%), 2 from the genioplasty (4.6%), and the remainder had multiple sites removed (9.3%). The laterality of hardware-associated symptoms was more often right-sided (51.1%) than left-sided (39.5%), and bilateral symptoms were less common (9.3%). A history of obstructive sleep apnea was documented in 9.3% of patients with hardware removed, as compared to 4.5% of the general population of orthognathic surgery patients. The population of patients with cleft and craniofacial syndromes was examined separately, and the rate of removal in this population of 121 patients was slightly lower than that of the general population (5%). The incidence of titanium hardware removal in this population of orthognathic surgery patients was 5.8%. Our findings suggest that there are patient-specific and procedure-specific factors associated with increased rates of titanium hardware removal after orthognathic surgery. Based on descriptive and multivariate analyses, higher risk groups include female patients, older patients, patients with obstructive sleep apnea, and patients in whom multiple jaws are operated. These patients may be counseled accordingly about the risk of future hardware removal.
Read full abstract