1996 Volume 42 Issue 8 Pages 867-869
This paper describes a patient with a severely hypoplastic mandible that was corrected with a bilateral distraction procedure. The patient was an 8-year-old boy with Pierre-Robin syndrome who had received a bilateral costochondral graft 2 years ago to lengthen the mandible.
A corticotomy was performed in the mandibular body proximal to the previous bone grafts. With the use of external distraction devices, the mandible was maintained in fixation for 6 days to permit callus formation. The devices were then serially lengthened at 0.75mm per day, and the mandible was lengthened about 14 mm in total. After 8 weeks of consolidation, the external fixation was removed, and bony union was confirmed on X-ray examination.
This technique proved to be very useful for correcting the bilateral hypoplastic mandible.
