Can skull defects affect health and life expectancy?

Cranial defects are a relatively common disorder in neurosurgery. We live in a complex social environment with various dangers and accidents, and our skull may be damaged in these dangers and accidents. For example, accidental traffic accidents, production safety accidents, falling objects, fights and brawls, and craniotomy due to our own craniosynostosis, etc. All these cases may eventually lead to cranial defects. Some patients ask if cranial defects can affect their health and life expectancy. If a cranial defect is not treated and repaired in a timely manner, there is a great possibility that it will affect health. In a 2016 academic paper published in the Chinese Journal of Neurosurgery, “Chinese Expert Consensus on Traumatic Cranial Defectoplasty”, it is pointed out that patients with large scale cranial defects may suffer from local scalp subsidence due to atmospheric pressure, which may lead to imbalance of intracranial pressure, displacement of brain tissue, as well as reduced blood flow to the cerebral hemispheres and disturbance of cerebrospinal fluid circulation, thus causing a series of clinical manifestations, mainly including: headache, vertigo, irritability, epilepsy, anisocoria, and anxiety, irritability, epilepsy, discomfort with no other explanation, and various mental disorders. These can be prevented and improved by cranioplasty, or skull repair surgery. As pointed out in the above-mentioned paper “Chinese Expert Consensus on Cranioplasty for Traumatic Cranial Defects”, cranioplasty (also known as cranial repair surgery) can not only repair the cranial defect, restore the patient’s skull appearance and protect the function, but also effectively restore the normal cerebrospinal fluid dynamics and cerebral cortical blood perfusion, which is conducive to reducing intracranial complications and helping the patient’s neurological function recovery. Cranial repair surgery is not easy to do well, and the choice of cranial repair materials is very important. At present, the more advanced and ideal cranial repair material is polyether ether ketone peek material, which is a new type of special polymer material, and its properties are very close to the human autologous cranial bone, which can achieve a more ideal repair effect.