Novel therapies to reduce scarring and quality of life assessment in orofacial ciefting

Orofacial clefts (OFCs) are serious birth defects with an overall prevalenee of 1/600 (1). OFCs are associated with a variety of problems related to feeding, hearing, speech, facial growth, dental and orthodontie conditions, and psychasodal status. Surgical interventions are provided to alleviate the problems related to OFCs, but may result in post-surgical complications, increasing morbidity (2). The health care burden is consequently high to families and health care facilities. OFCs generally require several surgical interventions, and despite improved palatoplasty, palata! scar tissue farms (3-6), which impairs maxillary and dental development. Also, cleft lip dosure causes dermal scarring, leading to lip shortening and contraction (7). Together, the resulting phenotype has a large impact on the patients quality of life. QoL is one of the most relevant health outcome measures in health sciences (8). It camprises the impact of the disease and/or treatment on different aspects of life, better known as health-related QoL (HRQoL). Several instruments have been developed to assess oral HRQoL (OHRQoL) in different population groups (9;10). QoL studies will clarify the patient-related perception of disease complications and related problems, and provide useful information for proper OFCs services planning, the impravement of care and patient-specific support. Despite this, studies on QoL of OFCs patients are scarce, especially in developing countries.