Aims:
This study aims to determine the frequency of occurrence of odontogenic lesions and compare the prevalence of odontogenic tumors and odontogenic cysts, according to age, gender, origin, malignancy, and recurrence rate among patients diagnosed with odontogenic lesions in a Nigerian teaching hospital.
Materials and Methods:
This is a retrospective cross-sectional study that examined all the records of the patients diagnosed histologically with jaw lesions at the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery of the University of Benin, for a period of 9 years from 2013 to 2021. The information recorded were age, gender, type of jaw, cell of origin of lesion, type of lesion, histopathological diagnosis, and the number of malignant and recurrent lesions. All data were analyzed using the IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS), version 23.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). The level of significance adopted was less than 0.05.
Results:
Of the 513 patients whose data were analyzed, 210 had odontogenic lesions giving a prevalence of 40.9%. The age range was 7–78 years with a mean age of 35.2 ± 15.0 years. More than half of the patients were less than 45 years old. The ratio of males to females was 1.3: 1. The prevalence of odontogenic tumors and cysts was 86.2% and 13.8%, respectively. More than half (52.4%) of the odontogenic lesions were ameloblastoma followed by ameloblastic carcinoma (8.60%), dentigerous cyst (4.80%), and calcifying odontogenic tumor being the least common (1.00%). Only 18.6% of the odontogenic lesions were malignant. There was a recurrence of 24.3% in the odontogenic lesions. The ratio of malignancy was 3.1: 1 in the odontogenic cysts and 4:1 in the odontogenic tumors, but these trends were not significant. The prevalence of recurrence of odontogenic tumors and cysts was 25.4% and 17.2%, respectively, but this finding was not significant (P = 0.31).
Conclusion:
There was a relatively high frequency of odontogenic lesions of 40.9% in our environment. The frequency of occurrence of odontogenic tumors was 86.2%, whereas that of odontogenic cysts was 13.8%.
