Abstract:

BACKGROUND: It is necessary for proper selection of repair methods and scaffold materials to understand repair methods of facial nerve injury and features and benefits of various scaffolds.
OBJECTIVE: To summarize the progress in nerve tissue engineering scaffolds or heterologous nerve grafts for repair of facial nerve defects.
METHODS: A computer search of PubMed and CNKI databases were performed using keyword of “tissue engineering scaffold, nerve transplantation, facial, repair” in Chinese and English. Totally 21 articles were reviewed.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: It is the best method to directly suture nerve stump immediately after facial nerve defects. Autologous nerve grafting is limited by implant sources, which often result in denervation of the donor site. Irregular growth of extrapyramidal myelinated and non-myelinated axons can lead to the fault regeneration of nerve fibers, causing serious shortcomings associated with the movement. Allogeneic or xenogeneic neural transplantation has yielded some results, but it is still used in the research phase of animal testing, which is difficult for clinical application.