Impacted Mandibular Third Molar: Approaches and Current Perspectives in Surgical Therapy

Abstract

Mandibular third molar surgery is a procedure that can be accompanied by several complications, one of the most important being neurological ones, resulting from transient or permanent injury to the lingual nerve (LNI) or inferior alveolar nerve (IANI). For this reason, a conservative technique, coronectomy, has been proposed. Despite the fact that this procedure seems to have important advantages, such as IANI reduction, it turns out that it is currently a non-standardized procedure, showing several limitations and requiring a precise and well-documented informed consent process because its use may potentially increase the practitioner’s medico-legal vulnerability.