Cleft lip and palate is one of the most common birth defects occurring 1 of every 700 live births. Historically, cleft lip and palate care typically involves the use of presurgical infant orthopedics appliances (PIOA) fabricated by a pediatric dentist as an adjunct to the overall management of the defect approximate the cleft segments prior to surgical repair. However, the necessity of presurgi...

mothers exposed to antiepileptic drugs (aeds) are at high risk to born babies with orofacial malformations such as cleft lips. about 9 percent of congenital abnormalities in babies of mothers with epilepsy relates to orofacial abnormalities. maintaining safe antiepileptic drugs for millions of mothers with epilepsy is very important. researches show that new aeds have less side effects than the...

BACKGROUND In the last two decades, India has witnessed a substantial decrease in infant mortality attributed to infectious disease and malnutrition. However, the mortality attributed to birth defects remains constant. Studies on the prevalence of birth defects such as neural tube defects and orofacial clefts in India have reported inconsistent results. Therefore, we conducted a systematic revi...

Background Oral clefts are among the common congenital birth defects with a broad phenotypic gamut. Since the epidermal ridges of the fingers and palms as well as the facial structures like lip, alveolus, and palate are formed from the same embryonic tissues during the same embryonic period, the genetic and environmental factors responsible for causing cleft lip and palate might also affect der...

To determine if Wnt5a gene involved in orofacial development, especially secondary palate development, we checked Wnt5a protein and mRNA in wild-type mouse embryos, and also searched Wnt5a knockout mice palates. We found Wnt5a is expressed during orofacial development, especially necessary for normal secondary palate and tongue morphogenesis. Wnt5a deficient mice exhibit cleft palate and abnorm...

Orofacial clefts (OFC) are complex birth defects. Studies using contemporary genomic techniques, bioinformatics, and statistical analyses have led to appreciable advances in identifying the causes of syndromic forms of clefts. This commentary gives an overview of the important cleft gene discoveries found using various genomic methods and tools.

We show that the well established Olami-Feder-Christensen (OFC) model for the dynamics of earthquakes is able to reproduce a striking property of real earthquake data. Recently, it has been pointed out by Abe and Suzuki that the epicenters of earthquakes could be connected in order to generate a graph, with properties of a scale-free network of the Barabási-Albert type. However, only the noncon...

The paper “Nonsyndromic Mandibular Symphysis Cleft” by Leela Krishna Guttikonda et al. was interesting. However, we would like to point out a factual error in the discussion in this paper. In the seventh paragraph of discussion the authors have attributed one theory for the formation of this cleft to Rana et al. for an article published in Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery in 2004. This is fact...