Plastic Surgery, Super Glue and Cleft Lip Treatment
Facial Plastic Surgery, Plastic Surgery Comments (2)
One of the most heart-breaking congenital birth defects, cleft lip and cleft palate, robs newborns, children and a few adults of smiles. The condition is so heart-breaking because it is easily repaired by plastic surgeons.
Left untreated, cleft lips and palates cause horrible problems in being accepted by other children and difficulties with speaking and eating. In some semi-literate places in the world, people are not aware the defect can be corrected.
When plastic surgeons donate their considerable skills and free time to performing surgery in foreign lands, the patient is often a child with a cleft lip, a cleft palate or both.
Surgery to repair the defect usually leaves a vertical scar running from the top lip into one or both nostrils.
Famous people who’ve had the birth defect include:
- Gunslinger Doc Holliday
- Todd Lincoln, 4th son of Abraham Lincoln
- Activist and Baptist minister Jesse Jackson,
- Actor Stacy Keach
- Broadcaster Tom Brokaw who had a cleft palate only
But a newer cleft lip surgery to repair the defect leaves fewer scars. You could almost call it sutureless smiles.
Part of the problem has been that nonabsorbable sutures require follow-up for removal and, for tots, another short spell under anesthetic. But more dissolvable sutures may leave some permanent scarring above the lip.
Using a form of surgical Superglue known to surgeons as butyl cyanoacrylate, plastic surgeons reporting in the March, 2009 issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, a professional journal for plastic surgeons, tell how some surgeons explain use sutures and the Superglue to close the surgical incision in cleft lip repair.
The doctors use sutures along the incision line but do not tie them off. Then the glue is applied. But before it dries, the sutures are removed. The authors report the method allows very young patients to feed, use pacifiers and bathe immediately.
A plastic surgeon in Malaysia also penned an article in The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal explaining how he performed the surgery on 104 children from three months of age to five years. Then, he followed them for five years.
Results? Five of the children required revision surgery for scar correction but the others had a scar so slight, it was barely visible.
According to the global charity, Smile Train, there are an estimated four million untreated clefts in the world.
admin @ April 8, 2009
Cleft lip as a congenital birth defect is indeed a curse for those who have it especially the children. It makes them uncomfortable and unhappy that is why the reconstructive surgeon is here to do their great job – to reshape that cleft lip and put it back to its normal form.
One of the most heartbreaking congenital birth defects? Really? My son has a cleft lip and palate. We visit our children’s hospital once a week for speech therapy. I can tell you that there are many other birth defects far more heartbreaking, those having to do with the heart or digestion, those that are life threatening and or non-correctable… I do understand that many children in this world don’t have access to the care they need for this condition. That is why Smile Train is such a great organization. But can we cut the melodrama? It does not serve those born with CLCP or their parents well. Great news about a new surgery though. Looks promising.