Contemporary state of surgical treatment of facial nerve paresis. Preliminary experience with new procedures.

Treatment of paresis of the facial nerve is a serious problem which has advanced greatly during the past three decades. The possibilities of surgical treatment are very extensive--from excisions, implantations of springs and weights, to passive and active supports, muscle transposition, transposition and suture of regional nerves to nervous and muscular transplants. The authors demonstrate their experience with transposition of the temporal muscle and methods of transplants of nervous grafts taken from the sural nerve and in the second stage transplants of a portion of the m. latissimus dorsi or m. serratus ant. in five patients. According to the authors the problem is that patients come for reconstruction operations after long time intervals and sometimes already after several operations. The most suitable surgical procedure must be selected on a strictly individual basis with regard to various mentioned criteria.