Nonsurgical Treatment & Clinical Validity

Management of Facial Asymmetry with Microimplants and Its Retention

Hyo-Sang Park

His research background was immunhistochemical studies for neurotransmitter following tooth movement and growth studies using rats as experimental animal. He did pioneer works and extensive researches on development of microimplants since 1999. He is using microimplants for 23 years and owned ten patents and wrote more than 100 international articles, six text books, and eight chapters dealing with Orthodontic Microimplants. He found Dentos Limited with collaboration with colleagues. He has spoken world renowned orthodontic meetings more than 80 times as keynote speaker and provided 2 or 3 days microimplants training course internationally more than 270 times.
He is doing reseaches concerning clinical use of microimplants, its biomechanics, and animal experiments to improve Microimplants.

Lecture Description

Facial symmetry is a disharmony of the facial feature, differences between the right and left sides of the face relative to the midsagittal plane or facial midline. If the amount of facial asymmetry is big, surgical correction is normally considered, and small amount of asymmetry tends to be ignored. However, with increased attention on facial beauty, patients are seeking treatment for facial asymmetry occasionally or complaining about facial asymmetry after treatment even though it is minor.

Treatment options include growth modification, correction of mild asymmetry with orthodontic treatment and orthognathic treatment. The role of microimplant in growth modification is to enhancing jaw bone asymmetry correction by minimizing dental compensatory movement of teeth by orthopedic appliances. In growing patients, asymmetric functional appliances can alleviate facial asymmetry by growth modification; however, the compensatory tooth movement caused by the appliance may block further correction of the facial asymmetry. This undesirable tooth movement can be prevented by using microimplants. In addition, asymmetry can be corrected by applying force to the jaw bone with elastics and microimplants.

The second role of microimplant is to correct dental transverse occlusal cant during orthodontic treatment for mild facial asymmetry patients in order to have balanced smile and alleviation of facial asymmetry after adaptational mandibular repositioning. This treatment can provide good quality of treatment to mild asymmetry patient who do not want orthognathic patients.

The third role of microimplant is the role in orthognathic surgery cases during decompensation, jaw bone position correction just after surgery, and finishing.

A speaker like to present cases for each category with rationale for these treatment and its long-term retention.