Acurácia diagnóstica da ultrassonografia na avaliação de doenças inflamatórias e obstrutivas das glândulas salivares maiores: uma revisão sistemática e meta-análise

Abstract

Inflammatory and obstructive disorders of the major salivary glands are very common and may be interrelated. Sialadenitis is a generic term that refers to inflammatory changes in these glands and may have an infectious, bacterial or viral origin, non-infectious or even obstruction. Sialolithiasis, one of the causes of obstructive disorders, is caused by the formation of calcified structures within the parenchyma or ducts of the salivary glands, as a result of the deposition of calcium salts around debris, notably in the lumen of the ducts. As a tool for the diagnosis of these alterations, ultrasound can be used, a safe method, which does not emit ionizing radiation, has no known deleterious effect, is inexpensive, easy to perform and which allows the acquisition of images in real time, with good resolution. Given these assumptions, the present systematic review and meta- analysis aimed to analyze studies that performed a comparative evaluation of the diagnostic accuracy of ultrasound for the diagnosis of sialadenitis and sialolithiasis, compared to other diagnostic imaging methods. A search was performed in the electronic databases PubMed (National Library of Medicine), Web of Science (Thomson Reuters), EMBASE (Elsevier) and SCOPUS (Elsevier), which resulted in the selection of 1,205 references. After reading titles and abstracts, 205 studies remained. These, read in full, led to 10 articles that met the eligibility criteria. Data on authors, date of publication, type of study, alteration or pathology evaluated, gland evaluated and diagnostic value of US (ultrasonography), considering its accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, positive likelihood ratio and of negative likelihood. Ultrasonography showed satisfactory results for the diagnosis of inflammatory and obstructive changes in the major salivary glands, which, compared to other diagnostic imaging tests, make it a method of choice for this purpose.