Facial Paralysis Treatment: Reanimating Your Smile скачать в хорошем качестве

Facial Paralysis Treatment: Reanimating Your Smile

#uvahealth #facialparalysis Facial paralysis can occur from a stroke, surgery, or genetics. It freezes the muscles in your face, either partially or entirely, limiting your ability to express yourself through movements like smiles or frowns. At UVA, we have introduced facial reanimation techniques that get your muscles and nerves back in action. Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon Sam Oyer, MD, describes how the facial paralysis treatment at UVA can bring a face back to life. Find out more at: https://uvahealth.com/services/facial... Facial reanimation surgery actually describes a group of procedures that are all directed towards improving facial paralysis. There are multiple reasons that people will develop facial paralysis. Some children are born with it, and they're never able to move one side of their face. Others get it because of trauma, or a tumor, or a surgery they may have undergone. Others get it because of an infection or something like Bell's palsy, which is actually one of the most common causes for facial paralysis. Facial reanimation really focuses on animating the face. It's exactly what it sounds like. And a lot of that focus is on bringing back a smile, improving the smile, and also improving eye closure. The reanimation surgery is based on how much of the facial nerve is actually available. So for some people who have a temporary injury in their facial nerve, you can do a facial nerve graft or a nerve transfer. This is where you borrow a neighboring nerve and hook it into the facial nerve to try to get motion back to those facial muscles. Whenever we can, we try to restore movement to the person's own facial muscles. If the injury was longer ago, more than two years, you can't get good motion by doing a nerve graft or a nerve transfer. You have to bring in new muscle to help give movement. So in those cases, we make a microsurgical approach where a leg muscle is actually transplanted into the face. The muscle is hooked up to a nerve in the face to help create a smile. So a full smile can occur when the patient smiles on the opposite side of the face or when they bite their teeth down with that nerve. Some of these surgeries are on the shorter end of the spectrum. When it's done as an outpatient procedure and a nerve transfer, a nerve graft can be done through a fairly limited incision. A patient is able to go home after the surgery is done. And they will see the recovery of the nerve function in as short as four to six months. But it does take a while for that nerve to grow through and for the face to start working a bit again. Longer surgeries that involve muscle transfer typically require a hospital stay of about two to three days. This is to make sure that the muscle is healthy and that everything is healing well before going home. At UVA, we have doctors and providers who are specially trained in this and dedicate a lot of our time and efforts, both in research and in clinical care, towards facial paralysis. So we have a whole team that can help a patient from start to finish, and we offer the full spectrum of treatment, from in-office Botox procedures, all the way up to microsurgical reconstruction.