Abstract
Preservation rate of the facial nerve in acoustic neuroma (AN) surgery has recently improved with the development of microsurgical techniques and state-of-the-art instruments . However, there are still cases in which facial nerve preservation is difficult due to the tumor adhering to the nerve and if the nerve fans out . These factors may lead to the damage of the nerve during surgical manipulations in a large tumor . In this paper the result of various methods of intracranial anastomosis in 20 cases were compared with those of hypoglossal-facial nerve anastomosis in 29 cases using the House-Brackmann method in all cases. Intracranial anastomosis should be done as a first choice . This procedure brings favorable results in most cases and makes it possible to exclude any later hypoglossal-facial nerve anastomosis. Lately, we highly recommend end-to-end anastomosis because we have attained better results than when using grafting techniques.
