Dentofacial form in the five-year-old child with unilateral cleft lip and palate.

It is generally believed that studies of outcome for children with clefts of the lip and palate should be based on patients who are in their teens. This means that health care workers who look after these children would have to wait many years until the quality of treatment could be evaluated. In this study, significant differences between two centers, Oslo and Manchester, in facial form at the age of 5 years were detected. Based on cephalometric analysis, children from Manchester were more likely to have a retrognathic maxilla with the upper lip significantly behind the esthetic plane. An important future step may be the setting up of "reference centers" with a large archive of database information for each racial group. This would assist smaller centers in comparing their outcomes.