Nasoalveolar molding of bilateral cleft of the lip and palate infants with orthopaedic ring plate

Objective: To introduce a simple, self-retentive and cost effective presurgical infant orthopaedic plate with anterior ring to retract and align the grossly protruded and deviated pre-maxilla and to perform the nasoalveolar moulding in order to facilitate initial lip repair. Method: The study was conducted in the orthodontic department of dental section of CH ICH Lahore. The nonprobable purposive sample consisted of 35 subjects (27 males, 8 females) with a median age of 7 days (1- 13 days). Nonsyndromic patients with bilateral complete cleft lip and palate were included in the study, patients were treated with custom made orthopaedic plate with an acrylic ring around the protruded premaxilla for around 3 months. Anthropometric readings and cast impressions were used to calculate the pre and post treatment differences, the data was tabulated and analysed using SPSS v 12. Results: The results showed highly significant ( .005) difference between the pre and post treatment records of variables except the intercanine distance where the results are significant i.e. ( 0.05). Conclusion: The orthopaedic plate causes significant retraction of the premaxillary segment without applying extra oral forces. It produces columellar elongation and increase in prolabium length facilitating the primary cheiloplasty and rhinoplasty to be precise and without additional scarring.