Procedure repairs skin cancer on nose in one step

A repair procedure involving a full-thickness skin graft and a separately harvested auricular cartilage graft allow for correction of deep nasal alar defects after Mohs micrographic surgery, results of a study indicate.

Investigators from University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, performed the procedure on 20 patients with deep Mohs micrographic surgery defects on the nasal ala. The results of the reconstruction procedures using full-thickness skin graft and auricular cartilage graft were prospectively studied at a tertiary care institution from 2010 to 2011 in a nonrandomized, nonblinded study, according to the abstract. Four independent surgeon raters used an ordinal five-point Likert scale evaluation of overall outcomes.

The mean outcome for the procedure was a score of 2.3 on a scale of 1 through 5, with 1 being excellent and 5 being poor. Mean duration of follow-up was six months, with a range of five weeks to 23 months. No clinically meaningful losses of constructs were reported.

Researchers noted that the one-step procedure utilizing the grafts are “valuable and reliable tools for reconstructing deep nasal alar defects that require support to prevent alar retraction or collapse, particularly when a single-stage procedure is preferred or necessary because of medical comorbidities.”

The study was published in the March/April issue of JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.