Is There An Extracranial Approach for Mild Hypertelorism?

Q: Dr. Eppley, I am a young male with mild hypertelorism and this given me cosmetic pain for a long time.
I heard that patients with mild hypertelorism undergo orbital wall osteotomy, not orbital box osteotomy. Box osteotomy is burdensome. The range I want to correct is about 4mm. And I don’t have the Mongolian folds that are characteristic of Asians. I don’t need soft tissue surgery.

I want to correct it with an extracranial approach, but I don’t have much information.I heard that you wrote a thesis on this.

A: When you refer to an extracranial approach to mild hypertelorism correction you could be talking about a variety of procedures. One approach is medial wall infracture with lateral orbital wall implant to push the eye inward  a few millimeters. For small amounts of hypertelorism improvement this can certainly be a less invasive way to achieve it.

Dr. Barry Eppley

Indianapolis, Indiana