Am I Good Candidate For Webbed Neck Surgery?

Q: Dr. Eppley, I was born with a webbed neck. But don’t have any syndrome that caused it, i really hate the way it looks and am trying to find options to get it done with surgery. First the only option was to have scars on both sides and i chose not to do that, then i saw your surgeries where the scar is at the back, what didn’t look bad, but i was wondering if a surgery like that would be possible for me. Hope you could answer that, thanks

.A:Thank you for sending your neck pictures. Your neck  appearance is fairly classic particularly for non-syndromic neck webbing. Most neck webbing i see is not associated with a genetic proven syndrome such as Turner’s or Noonan’s syndrome. As you may well have read there are different techniques in the treatment of neck webbing which primarily can be differentiated by those that are performed laterally on the side of the neck and those that are based more posteriorly on the back of the neck. While there can be debates about which produces a more effective and sustained correction of the neck webbing it is probably true that a direct lateral approach is a bit more effective. But the visible scarring for many patients may not be a worthy aesthetic trade-off. Thus I have always used a more posterior approach to keep the resultant scars more on the back of the neck as opposed to the sides. With the posterior approach there is always going to be some amount of relapse which is maximized in the first few months after the surgery. This is usually in the amount 30 to 50% from that scene immediately after the surgery. For most webbed neck patients  this is acceptable and they never move on to have a secondary revisional procedure which can maximize the results using the existing scars from the first surgery. This is the trade-off of the posterior approach. As you can see by this description no form of webbed surgery is perfect and each type has their advantages and disadvantages. I, and almost all patients, would prefer the option that better hides the scars. Once the scars are on the side of your neck with the lateral approach, no matter how they are revised, they are always going to be very visible.

Dr. Barry Eppley

World-Renowned Plastic Surgeon