Summary
Cleft lip and palate is a congenital malformation, present at birth caused by an alteration in the fusion of tissues, which occurs between the sixth and tenth week of intrauterine life. Babies with cleft lip and palate have difficulty in generating suction, which causes negative consequences such as fatigue during breastfeeding, prolonged feeding times, alterations in growth and development and malnutrition. Pre-surgical orthopedics allows stimulation and bone remodeling of the cleft nasal, alveolar and palatal segments, decreasing the size of the clefts and favoring feeding during the first 3 months of life, before cleft lip and palate surgery. The present clinical case is of a 27-day-old female patient with cleft lip and palate and severe malnutrition, to whom a palatal obturator was placed to favor suction, thus substituting feeding by nasogastric tubes, for which a digital intraoral scanner (Trios 3, 3Shape A/S) was used to take impressions of the entire upper jaw, The data was then sent to a stereolithographic 3D printer (250 mW laser, Form2, Formlabs) to fabricate a resin model where the obturator plate was made manually with the conventional drip technique in the laboratory.
KEY WORDS: labiopalatal fissures, pre-surgical orthopedics, digital flows, palatal obturator.
How to cite this article
VILLARREAL, M. K.; TORRE, D. G.; GARROCHO, R. J. A.; MÁRQUEZ, P. R.; FERNÁNDEZ, R. H. C. & ROSALES, B. M. A. Pre-surgical orthopedics using digital flows in newborns with cleft lip and palate. Int. J. Odontostomat., 19(1):60-64, 2025.
