AMNET Meeting held on Saturday 9th  April 2011

at Addenbrookes Hospital

For our first meeting of the year we were very pleased to welcome Mr Richard Price, Consultant Plastic Surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He spoke to us about facial palsy, the causes, effects and management. He described how people may be born with a facial palsy, or it may be acquired, often as a result of trauma such as surgery. He described the effects of a facial palsy and then went on to show the various mechanisms surgeons use to try to reconstruct the face. Some methods are described as ‘static’ such as gold weights in the eyelid, they improve the appearance but do not provide movement. Dynamic repair aims to replace the nerve function and provide movement of the facial muscles. During question time he emphasised the importance of early referral and said that if it was known that the facial nerve would be cut during surgery for acoustic neuroma, he will operate at the same time to carry out nerve transfers, so they will start working as soon as possible.

We are grateful to Mr Price for his talk which was well illustrated and proved very interesting. A full report will be available in the next newsletter.