ABSTRACT
Facial asymmetry is the most frequent disease in craniofacial deformities. And the primary causing area of that is mostly placing in mandible. That is to say, it is known that primarily, mandible grows excessively or deficiently, and other facial region involving maxilla undergoes compensatory growth secondarily, so asymmetric face develops. In facial asymmetry, the surgical correction of undergrowth is more difficult than that of overgrowth and the reason of it is the postoperative relapse caused by stress of surrounding soft tissues. It means the stress of surrounding soft tissues occurring after bone lengthening and reducing above stress is the same meaning with reducing postoperative relapse. Among various areas, mandibular ramus is the most difficult area to lengthen vertically and maintain its length. The reason of it is considered by many authors as the stress of surrounding pterygomasseteric sling which is enveloping lower border of mandible and interrupting elongation of ramal height. So we applied two different surgical procedures in which pterygomasseteric slings have different stress respectively to monkeys which have similar masticatory function and anatomy to human being and compared relapse by radiographic film and observed periodically the histochemical change of masseteric muscle fiber. So we could see the following results. The relapse was less in EVRO group in which we separated pterygomasseric sling in inferior border and didn't approximate muscle sling after vertical lengthening to minimize the stress of soft tissues than IVRO group in which we elongated ramal height preserving pterygomassetric sling. Of course, we could see a problem in EVRO group such as bone resorption in inferior border caused by uncovering the periosteum of inferior border. But we expect that such problem will be solved by developing periosteum substitutes for covering the exposed bone and minimizing the surgical trauma. In histochemical study of masseteric muscle fiber, the fiber constituents of EVRO group in which we minimized soft tissue stress was changed immediately after operation and maintained it for 1 year, whereas that of IVRO group in which we preserved soft tissue stress was changed in more portion after operation and recovered it by 1 year . By the histochemical results, we can see that the recovery of fiber constituents reflect the recovery of muscle stress and it is closely related with relapse phenomenon.