Educational intervention for the evaluation of nasal symmetry in cleft lip and palate operated patients.

Background: Nasal asymmetry is one of the most frequent characteristics of patients with cleft lip and palate. The anthropometric measurement (AM) is an accessible and reliable method that can be used by specialists to evaluate nasal asymmetry in patients with cleft lip and palate. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational intervention applied to cleft lip and palate specialists to increase the accuracy of AM in the evaluation of nasal asymmetry.

Methods: Quasi-experimental study.

Results: In the first phase of the study, five of the 13 AM reported a mean difference (MD) > 1.5 mm, and 12 of the 13 AM showed results greater than 2 SD (standard deviations). In the second phase, the results showed 11 of the 13 AM with MD < 1 mm, and 9 of the 13 AM were less than 2 SD.

Conclusions: The intervention carried out with the manual of AMs increased the knowledge of the specialists on the anatomy points and AM that can be used to evaluate the nasal asymmetry in patients with cleft lip and palate. Educational intervention help to increase the agreement between examiners to perform a reliable evaluation of nasal asymmetry in patients with these conditions.