For the first time in her young life, an 11-year-old girl from Virginia is able to smile using the right side of her face.
Nicole's condition, unilateral congenital facial paralysis, is usually diagnosed at birth.
He met Nicole around 2018 when he was at Johns Hopkins. Finding someone to treat the condition in children can be difficult, he said. The leg muscle pulled on the corner of the mouth, allowing patients to generate a smile. But the resulting smiles pulled the corner of the mouth up in an unnatural way, Byrne said.spent years trying to perfect a different technique, the multivector gracilis muscle flap, where surgeons take a section of the gracilis muscle, located on the thigh, and separate it into two smaller strips. They then insert the muscle into the face at the corner of the mouth or upper lip to the cheek and eyelid.
The multi-vector procedure didn't address the area around the eyes, but Byrne's latest procedure on Nicole, the trivector gracilis free tissue transfer, does. During the procedure, Byrne's team added three slips of muscle versus two, including under and around the eyes for the first time.A healing journey for Nicole
The 11-year-old has a big personality, her mother said. She loves playing basketball, taking care of animals, and art is her jam. She actually celebrated her birthday recently and got new art supplies. "She has a beautiful smile," he said."There's really nothing, to me, more fascinating than this nuance of facial expression because it really is what makes us human in so many ways."
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