Abstract
We have discussed the clinical records of 1,730 patients with cleft lip and/or palate that were kept in custody of the office for materials on cleft lip and/or palate at the 2nd Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, School of Dentistry, and Aichi Gakuin University for the past 10 years, and obtained the following conclusion.
1. Of these 1,730 patients,1,135 (65.6%) were those who were primarily operated on for this disease and those on a waiting list. When classified by the types of disease, cleft lip was treated in 244 (39.1%), cl eft lip and palate in 283 (45.4%) and cleft palate in 97 (15.5%) males, while cleft lip in 171 (33.5%), cleft lip and palate in 179 (35.0%) and cleft palate in 161 (31.5%) females, which were almost identical to the results of our investigations on the overall number of newborns in Aichi prefecture.
2. When the patients were classified by their communities,1,197 (69.2%) patients lived in Aichi prefecture,452 (26.1%) in Nagoya city,491 (28.2%) in Owari and 254 (14.9%) in Mikawa. Those living in the three prefectures of Aichi, Gifu and Mie registered 92.4% of all patients, with 241 (13.9%) living in Gifu prefecture,160 (9.3%) in Mie prefecture,32 (1.8%) in Shizuoka prefecture,15 (0.9%) in Nagano prefect u re and 85 (4.9%) in the other communities.
3. It was surmised from the overall number of newborns we obtained that about 60% from Aichi prefecture, and about 30-50% from Gifu and Mie prefectures visited our department.
4. Although the patients who were treated at our department belonged to a variety of age brackets,1,304patients were children younger than 15 years who registered 75.4% out of all the patients.
5. An increase and decrease of the patients who were primarily examined at our department were almost in parallel to the changes in the spontaneous incidence.
6. In terms of the ratio of primary operations and repeated plastic surgery, the primary operation registered as high as 45.2%-60.8%. The primary operative ratio declined during the past 5 years, but this was attributable to a decline of a relative ratio due to an increase of patients who received repeated plas tic surgery.
