Role of carnoy’s solution in the treatment of keratocystic odontogenic tumor: A systematic review

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE The keratocystic odontogenic tumor is a benign but aggressive neoplasm. As enucleation alone obtains high recurrence rates, some adjuvant treatments such as Carnoy's solution have been proposed. The aim of this study is to evaluate the reduction of recurrences with the use of Carnoy's solution as adjuvant in the treatment of keratocystic odontogenic tumors. MATERIAL AND METHODS An electronic search in Pubmed (MEDLINE), ScienceDirect and Cochrane databases was conducted with the key words "odontogenic keratocyst", "keratocystic odontogenic tumor", "carnoy's solution", "treatment" and "enucleation". The inclusion criteria were clinical studies using Carnoy's solution as adjuvant for the treatment of keratocystic odontogenic tumors, published in English, including at least 10 patients. Articles with an unclear reporting of the treatment applied, nonhuman studies, case reports and lesions associated to Gorlin-Goltz syndrome were excluded. RESULTS All the studies included were case series. The recurrence rate of enucleation ranged from 0% to 58.8%. With the only use of Carnoy's solution as adjuvant treatment to the enucleation, recurrences varied from 0% to 100%. The use of ≥ 2 adjuvant treatments reduced the range between 0% and 7.9%. CONCLUSIONS The use of Carnoy's solution as adjuvant therapy for the treatment of keratocystic odontogenic tumor has a grade C recommendation.