The habilitation of the congenital cleft palate patient

Abstract

1. 1. Preparation of congenital cleft palate patients for normal life is a challenge to the efforts of modern medical science. 2. 2. The causative factors leading to cleft lips and palates are recognized as defects in intrauterine development of the embryo during the second month of fetal life. 3. 3. The etiological factors as to how clefts occur are far better understood than the reasons why they occur. One school of thought holds that a gene defect is responsible, thereby indicating inheritance. Valuable experimentation has proved that clefts may be produced by environmental situations, such as lack of oxygen or subjection of the mother to such drugs as cortisone. 4. 4. The occurrence of clefts is recognized as approximately one in 700 live births. In extremely large samples of population it has been found that 70.83 per cent of all clefts occur in males and 29.17 per cent in females. I have found that far more than twice as many clefts occur on the left side as on the right. It has been authoritatively stated that 16 per cent of all cases presented bilateral clefts. In my sampling, 47.3 per cent were bilateral in the palate and 30.5 per cent were bilateral in the lip. 5. 5. The total habilitation of the patient with cleft lip and cleft palate has been found to be best achieved through the combined efforts of pediatrician, surgeon, psychologist, otolaryngologist, restorative dentist, orthodontist, prosthetic dentist, and speech pathologist. 6. 6. In addition to obvious cosmetic improvement, the speech intelligibility of a patient benefiting from integrated habilitation was found to increase as much as 13.2 per cent, with an average increase for the sample of 7.13 per cent.