Can microtia be treated?

summary

The treatment of congenital microtia or atresia is mainly through auricle reconstruction. Patients are required to keep enough attention to accept the treatment of this disease, and the operation time is usually before and after school age. For unilateral children, the external auditory canal and periosteum plasty to improve hearing is generally not advocated. So we must do a good job in the related work of this disease, so can microtia be treated?.

Can microtia be treated?

First: auricle plastic surgery: the operation is difficult and there are many complications, so whether to operate unilateral microtia has always been controversial. It usually takes two to three surgeries. In some cases of mild malformation, some parents simply think that it is enough to open the ear canal. In fact, if the middle ear position is abnormal, opening the ear canal will not help hearing. We can simply think that auricle plastic surgery, the main content is to do a false ear, open an ear canal. In the previous "false ear" production, a piece was cut from the last rib to carve out the appearance of an ear. But with the development of medical materials in recent years, we can use silica gel or 3D printing to make "false ears". With less pain, it can also be replaced after the ears grow a little bit.

Second: hearing reconstruction surgery: if the auricle reconstruction surgery is done, the next step is to do hearing reconstruction surgery. If the function of the middle ear can be recovered, only open the ear canal surgery, of course very good. But most patients with microtia have "abnormal middle ear position". Therefore, it is difficult to reconstruct hearing only by plastic surgery.

Third: Ponto bone conduction hearing aid: Ponto is a kind of implanted bone conduction hearing aid that was very famous on Weibo. It has the similar principle with BAHA, but it is fully implanted. Ponto, the manufacturer of Oticon, the world's second-largest hearing aid, has previously acquired cochlear implants from France, which can be used for very severe hearing loss users and is said to enter China in 2015. Ponto operation is not in my mind in mainland China at present.

matters needing attention

Microtia is a common auricle deformity. Some users will choose not to treat, especially unilateral microtia. After all, they still have hearing, which has little impact on life; Some users will choose surgery, but objectively speaking, the risk of surgery is not small.