Best Treatment Choice for Osteonecrosis of the Jaw

BETCON is a pragmatic randomized controlled open-label multi-center study in patients with newly diagnosed stage I-II MRONJ designed to answer the question whether minimally invasive management with LPRF membranes or primary surgical treatment is better than the standard of care of conservative therapy alone. The primary end-point is the time to mucosal healing. Secondary end-points consist of supporting measures of efficacy, patient reported symptoms, quality of life, well-being, and functioning.

While effective for symptom control and well tolerated, conservative treatment of MRONJ yields highly variable mucosal healing rates ranging between 20 to 50%. In an effort to improve these suboptimal outcomes, many adjunct treatment modalities have been studied, of which the use of minimally invasive surgery with autologous platelet rich plasma (LPRF) to improve wound healing has attracted considerable attention, with reported mucosal closure rates of up to 86% in single arm case series. More recently, improved understanding of the need for pre-operative infection control and adaptation of surgical protocols has renewed the interest in the primary surgical treatment of MRONJ with mucosal closure achieved in up to 90% of patients in some case series. Therapeutic studies of MRONJ have almost exclusively focused on mucosal healing as the desired end-point of MRONJ treatment, with little or no attention to patient symptoms, quality of life, functioning and well-being during treatment, even though the resolution of MRONJ symptoms and limiting treatment related adverse events may be equally important to patients. This comparative effectiveness research (CER) study is a randomized controlled open-label multi-center study in patients with newly diagnosed stage I-II MRONJ and is designed to answer the question whether minimally invasive treatment with LPRF membranes or primary surgical treatment improves outcomes when added to the standard of care of conservative treatment alone. The study also incorporates pragmatic design elements and uses patient reported outcomes (PRO) to determine which treatment offers the best humanistic outcomes considering both efficacy and measures of quality of life, functioning, well-being and symptom control. Indeed, this study will not use an investigational new drug (or drug regimen), device, or surgical technique, but rather evaluate their relative efficacy to guide future clinical management. Finally, plasma and saliva will be collected to identify prognostic and predictive biomarkers of outcome.