Abstract
ABSTRACT Surgical treatment for palate cancers can result in oral-nasal/sinus communication, which impairs the swallowing, speech and chewing ability of patients with reflux of ingested food into the nasal cavity, reducing their quality of life. This article aims to report how three cancer patients, with different types of palate cancer undergoing partial maxillectomy with oroantral or oral-nasal communication as postoperative sequelae were prosthetically rehabilitated from 2009 to 2015. The prostheses were made by dental-surgeons interns in the service of the Multidisciplinary Residency in Oncological Healthcare of the Hospital School of the Federal University of Pelotas (HE/UFPel). One of the patients is completely edentulous, the second partially toothed and in the third case the patient is totally toothed, only requiring the obturator. The creation of prosthetic rehabilitation followed the steps of conventional prostheses, especially observing the particularities in the planning, molding, installation and adjustment stages of the prosthesis. In all cases there was improvement on speech immediately after the prosthesis installation and patients reported greater ease to feed.
Highlights
Treatment for cancers in the head and neck region commonly involves a surgical stage[1]
The purpose of this paper is to report how three cancer patients subjected to partial maxillectomy with oroantral or oral-nasal communication as a postoperative sequelae were prosthetically rehabilitated
Patients with intraoral disability resulting from maxillectomy complain about swallowing difficulties and fluids reflux through the nasal cavity accompanied by speech/communication difficulties[5,6], which were observed in the three cases described at the beginning of the treatment and noticed upon removal of the obturating prosthesis
Summary
Treatment for cancers in the head and neck region commonly involves a surgical stage[1]. When the disease affects the maxilla, the surgical treatment (partial or total maxillectomy) often results in communications between the oral cavity and nasal/sinus cavities[2,3,4]. Patients with oro-nasal/sinus communication face several problems, including fluid reflux through nasal cavity as well as difficulty chewing, swallowing and speaking, with immediate reduction in the quality of life[5,6]. The literature brings no consensus on rehabilitation of patients undergoing maxillectomies. Rehabilitating these patients is a challenge and fulfilling the requirements such as retention, stability and sealing of the prosthesis can be hard[2,3,4]. Rehabilitation of the patient with maxillary loss can comprise surgical or prosthetic treatment or even a combination of both.
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