Abstract
A Primary goal in the cleft palate surgery has been to develop surgical methods for doing more early surgical repairs without interfering with involved tissues potential for continueing normal growth and function. Most cleft palate surgeries entail leaving areas of denuded bone on lateral aspects of the hard palate and evidence from animal experimentations confirmed that contraction is an early link in a causal chain of events which results in diminished postsurgical maxillary growth. The strategies to promote a more favorable growth result are to find a surgical design which minimize the adverse effects of postsurgical contraction and to find appropriate surgical timing for the least damage to growth. Thus, we are now analizing results from animal trials of a newly designed, ridge flap, modification for palatoplasties. The design was based on observations that wounds which involved alveolar ridge mucosa contracted less than those which were entirely on the hard palate, and that teeth tend to drift toward healing wounds both before and after eruption. Thus, the ridge flap design involves lateral incision for pedicle flaps instead of medial aspects of alveolar ridge during the time when primary molars are still beneath the mucoperiosteum. Results thus far indicate that maxillary growth in width is significantly better, in the beagle model, than when clefts are closed with more traditional palatoplasty models.
Similar studies using beagle s, where we are testing hypothesis that surgically induced maxillary growth inhibition will be less are also presented.
Parts of this hork were supported by USPHS Research Grants DE 00853 and DE 05837, NIDR, Bethesda, MD.
