Stigma, body image, and quality of life in women seeking orthognathic surgery.

Background: Orthognathic surgery has been increasingly performed in the authors' country. To ascertain the increased satisfaction that comes with surgery, it is necessary to evaluate the patient's motivation for surgery.

Methods: Seventy-four female patients were evaluated before surgery. The control group consisted of 124 female patients. All participants completed the measures of perception of appearance, body image, stigma, and quality of life on an individual basis. These measures were tested, with satisfactory reliability and validity.

Results: Patients scored significantly lower than the control group on the measures for perception of appearance, stigma of surgery, and quality of life, but higher on appearance orientation and stigma of deformity. Correlation analyses revealed various patterns of intercorrelations of subscales of stigma and body image in both groups. Regression analysis yielded three significant predictors for surgery motivation (i.e., satisfaction of facial areas, stigma of surgery, and appearance orientation), altogether accounting for 46.2 percent of the total variance.

Conclusions: Given the broadly known importance of body image in seeking surgery, it may be equally important to take stigma into consideration of the patient's motivation. Further investigations are needed.