Morphological change of the submucous cleft palate (SMCP) is generally mild and does not exhibit a marked cleft, therefore, the disorder often fails to be noticed in the earlier stage, and by the time the patients visit a hospital, they have already developed hyper nasality and articulation disorder, which makes the treatment more difficult and there are also many problems in initiating treatment. There is a great deal of variety in speech disorders. In addition, the symptoms vary considerably according to the degree of disorder, so much remains unknown about the treatment. However, the patients of SMCP vary from a patient needing surgical therapy to a normal patient able to speak without surgical treatment. In this study, we investigated the present state of patients with submucous cleft palate who visited our department with the purpose of aiding future treatment.
The results are as follows:
1. There were 24 males and 26 females, with a male to female ratio of 1: 1.08.
2. Chief complaints were speech problems (60.0%), 15 patients (30.0%) desired to undergo a detailed oral examination, 3 (6.0%) desired surgery, and 2 (4.0%) desired prosthesis surgery.
3. In the treatment of speech disorder, sixteen patients (36.4%) underwent speech rehabilitation only, and 28 patients (63.6%) underwent surgery combined with speech rehabilitation.
4. During the course of observation, 93.8 % of the cases with speech disorder were improved after speech therapy only, and 96.4% of the cases with disorder were improved after surgical operation and speech therapy
The difficulty in diagnosis of submucous cleft palate was due to the lack of suitable clinical systems. Therefore it is necessary for clinics to cooperate in the treatment of submucous cleft plate.
