Page 104 - Craniomaxillofacial Implant Surgery - Jeroen P.J. Dings
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Chapter 6
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Patient group
All patients treated for nasal and auricular defects (either with surgery or prosthodontics) in a tertiary referral centre between 1997 and 2016 and who had a minimum follow-up period of six months were selected for inclusion in this study. All nasal and auricular defects were treated by medical specialists working at the Departments of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Special Dental Care, Otorhinolaryngology or Plastic Surgery at the Radboud university medical center, Nijmegen, Netherlands. A total of 119 patients with autologous or prosthetic reconstructed nasal or auricular defects were identified, and standardised clinical photographs could be retrieved from the medical records of 65% of these patients (77 patients in total) (Table 1).
Table 1 Patient demographics.
Prosthetic (N=17)
Ear
Nose
Autologous Prosthetic (N=12) (N=24)
Autologous (N=24)
Sex
Male 9 10 13 13 Female 8 2 11 11
Age*
Mean 42.2 21.4 72.0 58.8 Range 14–80 12–59 37–90 35–80
*Age in years
Questionnaire
Clinical photographs of the patients were presented in a digital survey, with a standardised questionnaire used to assess the subjective satisfaction with the aesthetic result. Using SurveyMonkey Inc. (San Mateo, California, USA; www.surveymonkey.com), two separate questionnaires were designed for patients with either nasal or auricular reconstructions. The questionnaires consisted of three parts: an assessment of the overall appearance of the reconstructed ear or nose, scored on a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) from 0 (most negative) to 100 (most positive); general questions concerning the colour, facial position, and height and width of the reconstructed ear or nose; and finally an assessment of the aesthetic appreciation of the anatomical subunit. The second and third parts were scored on a five-point Likert scale (1 = ‘very poor’, 5 = ‘excellent’) to enable comparisons with previous research. An example of the full questionnaire is available in the appendix.
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