#craniofacial

[wavy-gorl]

happy cleft and craniofacial awareness month to all the cleft&craniofacial girlies who were forced to go through speech therapy

[bpod-bpod]

Getting A Head

3D imaging combined with tissue clearing and immunostaining reveals the development of the head and its organs as a human embryo grows – insight into understanding craniofacial defects and neurological disorders, and how to diagnose and treat them

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Raphael Blain and colleagues

Sorbonne Université, INSERM, CNRS, Institut de la Vision, Paris, France

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Published in Cell, December 2023

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[raydrawsdaly]

"Your soul is a beautiful thing, child," replied the grave man's voice, "and I thank you."

[evolving-science]

New Research Proves That Cleft Lip Is More Than Just A Genetic Condition

A new study has investigated the genetics of the cleft lip, a relatively common physical defect in humans, developed at birth. This work also highlights the importance of molecular regulators, such as histone modification, in normal embryonic development.

[wavy-gorl]

it's so real that i was born in craniofacial awareness month, i was born to slay mouth breathing and 11 surgeries

[wavy-gorl]

I've only met two other people with cleft palates (both on this app) and while all of our experiences have been different, I'm glad to know that we're all connected by our lack of representation in media and our hate for speech therapy

[wavy-gorl]

did not realize there was a community for this, but this is the internet i should've known

hi i was born with a cleft soft and hard palate, i didn't have a cleft lip or anything else (still tagging this because i wanna reach anyone who understands), my mom told me that i also have the thing where you have a really small chin combined with a cleft palate but i don't remember the name of the condition

i've like literally never been able to talk to anyone else who's had one and i mean my friends all know about it and i love them, but like they don't fully understand bc they haven't experienced it, you know how it is

but uh yeah i've always felt really weird labeling myself as like disabled or anything like that because i've always felt like my cleft palate wasn't enough but honestly my entire life has kinda revolved around it so i feel like i should

here's the part where i'm going to dump in a list all of my super specific experiences in hopes that someone will relate because i am so serious when i say that i've never talked to someone who relates before:

tw: idk medical stuff, ed mentioned (arfid specifically), mildly graphic i guess (just complaining about medical stuff i've had to deal with)

i've had 11 surgeries (feeding tube, adenoids removed, palate repairs, and ear tubes)

i have this sick as fuck second belly button and honestly sometimes i forget that most people only have one and i have to do a double take when i see other people's boring abdomens

i have a list of foods that i cannot eat because they taste like general anesthesia (including but not limited to: whoppers, onion rings, cranberry juice, blue candy hearts, and wintergreen life savers)

i was diagnosed with arfid recently, but i've had it my entire life because i had a feeding tube for the first year of my life and so i just cannot handle most food textures

i have really bad social skills and low self-esteem because i got bullied when i was younger because people couldn't understand me because my voice was really weird, this got better with surgeries but it didn't fix my lack of social skills

I HATED SPEECH THERAPY, like 14 years of it did not make s sounds easier to pronounce

i need hearing aids but i can't get them because i have holes in my ears and extreme drainage, but the holes are good because they allow my ears to drain but the fact that there's drainage is still bad and ahhhhhh

i'm 19 but i still have to go back and forth between the children's hospital and the regular one when it comes to palate stuff and it's honestly annoying sometimes (everyone's nice though so it's fine)

eating is awful because nose stuff i don't want to go into detail but iykyk (don't make me laugh while eating)

i don't have a uvula and when people find out, it's suddenly the most interesting fact they know about me and i don't get it

not even i know my full medical history it is so incredibly complex

i have a collection of my wristbands

the worst fucking thing in the world was the stupid nasal endoscopy, like early covid brain-poking tests were fucking nothing compared to that stupid camera going up my nose

mouth breathing

i have random vocal/breathing tics (i guess tic is the right term?) and they are annoying but yeah

every goddamn time i went to the orthodontist, he would always say every FUCKING TIME "don't let your mom tell you that you have a big mouth because i'm here to tell you otherwise" LIKE I GET IT

when i got my teeth pulled, the laughing gas didn't work because 1.) that shit's so weak and 2.) i had to breathe it in through my nose exclusively (mouth breathing point), but they didn't believe me and went along with the procedure anyway and after experiencing that, hell has nothing on me

my role model growing up was lentil bean, the cleft palate dog

the only piece of media i ever related to was Wonder, but even that one contributed to me feeling like i hadn't gone through enough to consider my cleft palate a big deal

i am a musician (singer and percussionist) but i can't breathe, hear, or speak properly and so i bet you can imagine how hellish that is

i had to quit dance when i was younger because i kept missing entire seasons because of my surgeries (since recovery was like 4 weeks sometimes) and i really wish that i didn't have to

ok yeah that's all i can think of please someone relate to me god please

[bpod-bpod]

Cracking Skulls

Our skulls are shaped in the womb and continue growing after birth, yet the behaviour of bone-building cells called skeletal progenitors still has scientists scratching their heads. Here researchers scan a mouse’s cavarium – the top part of its skull – using 3D light-sheet microscopy to highlight the tissue patterns inside. Web-like arteries (highlighted in green), channel blood towards capillaries, sprinkler-like pores which nourish the surrounding cells with fluid and nutrients – some of these (shown in red) are nurturing nearby skeletal progenitor cells (grey). Teasing apart the tangle of different types of craniofacial vessel using computer algorithms (at the end of the video), allows researchers to examine how their patterns change over time – as the skull develops, or after injury – giving insights into human developmental conditions such as micrognathism.

Written by John Ankers

Video by Alexandra N. Rindone and colleagues

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, October 2021

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