DRY SOCKET ETIOPATHOGENESIS, MANAGEMENT and PREVENTION: A BRIEF SYSTEMATIC REVIEW of LITERATURE

Dry socket is an unavoidable complication of dental extraction facing the dental practitioners on a regular basis. We performed a brief systemic review of the etiopathogenesis, prevention and management of dry socket. The inclusion criteria for including articles were that all the studies discussed the dry socket etiopathogenesis, prevention and management and the exclusion criteria were all the studies that included other complications of tooth extraction. The method used for this systemic review was to search in the PubMed database using MeSH terms “dry socket”, “alveolar ostitis” for etiopathogenesis, prevention and management and published in the English language, 86 articles were identified by abstract for relevance to etiopathogenesis, prevention and management of dry socket and a total of 24 publications were included in the final systematic review according to the specific keywords and materials mentioned above. The audit of the literature showed that the prevention methods include avoiding smoking after surgery, atraumatic extraction, the use of antibiotics and other preventive measures such as use of chlorhexidine rinse or gel to reduce the incidence of dry socket. For management of dry socket, wide range of treatment options are being suggested including using chlorhexidine or saline solution irrigation, placement of non- absorbable obtundent dressing(zinc oxide eugenol dressing) or absorbable dressing(alveogyl dressing) and instruction of home rinsing with chlorhexidine mouthwash. There are also new agents in the field being tried that accelerates the healing of the socket such as PRF and GECB as well as combination of PRF with chlorhexidine gel. This paper is a brief review of the literature on etiopathogenesis, prevention and management of dry socket, in order to best guide clinical practice based on current available evidence