Quality of life in patients with oral hard or soft tissue defects after reconstructive microsurgery.

With current advances in medicine, many surgical methods have emerged for the reconstruction of soft and hard tissue defects of the head and neck. Current literature provides only a limited amount of evidence in studies addressing differences in quality of life for specific therapeutic measures in microvascular reconstruction. The validated University of Washington quality of life questionnaire version 4 (UW-QoL v4), a distress thermometer, and two questions addressing donor-site morbidity were sent to 134 patients at a tertiary care centre.