First, a child can be cured by undergoing cleft lip and palate surgery at an early stage.
Many parents rush to ask for surgery as soon as their children are born, thinking that one or two surgeries can solve the problem. In fact, cleft lip and palate affects not only the face and voice, but also is often accompanied by abnormal maxillary development, abnormal tooth eruption and other symptoms, of which surgical treatment is only part of the content. In the process of growing up, it will also affect the psychological, hearing, facial aesthetics and other functions of the affected child. Its treatment needs to be carried out by oral and maxillofacial surgery, orthodontics, prosthetics, ENT and psychologists in stages, i.e. from birth to adulthood, in the best period of various treatments, using a comprehensive sequence of treatments for the best treatment effect. With the current treatment methods, it is possible to make the majority of patients’ faces and voices close to normal, thus relieving their pain, integrating into society, regaining confidence and happiness in life.
Second, unclear speech in children with cleft palate is inevitable and requires many years of speech therapy.
It is not inevitable for children with cleft palate to have slurred speech after surgery. Slurred speech is closely related to some of the following factors: 1. Missing the best time for surgery. Because the peak of children’s voice pronunciation is before 2 years old. Due to cleft palate, normal articulatory structures do not exist, so there is a cleft palate speech and compensatory speech that is difficult to correct. The older this pathological voice is, the more difficult it is to correct.
2. It is possible that the surgery did not achieve complete palatopharyngeal closure. The purpose of cleft palate surgery is to reconstruct the “palatopharyngeal closure” to create conditions for normal swallowing and speech. Palatopharyngeal closure refers to the coordinated movement of the soft palate and the posterior pharyngeal wall during the articulation process. Each child has different types of cleft palate and different local development, and the surgical difficulty of reconstructing palatopharyngeal closure varies.
3. No postoperative speech therapy is performed. Generally speaking, as long as the surgery is properly timed and successful, 70-80% of cleft palate patients can obtain the same language as normal children as they grow older after surgery and do not need special speech training, while the remaining about 20-25% of children have language problems and need to determine the cause and use language training or further surgical correction according to their condition.
Third, children with cleft lip and palate are developmentally delayed and less intelligent than normal people.
Patients with cleft lip and palate are not disabled but have a healthy physique and intelligent intelligence. With the exception of a few syndromic cleft lip and palate patients, children with cleft lip and palate show only mild deficits in written expression and delayed language development in the early years of learning, with language impairment, hearing loss and behavioral inhibition, but these manifestations can be overcome with intensive training and have no effect on school completion. Most of this mental retardation is due to environmental factors such as early hearing loss, language stimulation, and behavioral inhibition that can affect intellectual development. These patients show a slightly inferior intelligence early on, and as they grow older, their intellectual development is no different from that of normal people.