Surgical correction of hypertrophic upper lip in vascular malformations

Abstract

Capillary malformations (CMs) and Lymphatic malformations (LMs) are vascular malformations that share a common tendency to cause soft and hard tissue hypertrophy, expressed in the three dimensions of the space. The middle third of the face is the most commonly involved area, with a predominance of the upper lip.To our knowledge, no paper has previously focused on the surgical technique to correct such deformities. We propose and illustrate a surgical protocol, consisting in merging an asymmetric bikini upper lip reduction and a unilateral bull horn resection technique, that allowed to reduce the overall volume of the hypertrophied lip thus restoring lip symmetry. We adopted this technique in 2 patients affected by CMs and 4 patients with LMs, with satisfactory results.