Your Questions

Q: Dr. Eppley, I am interested in a minor skull reshaping procedure. Can you fix the dent on the right side of my head with relatively minimal invasive surgery? Question 2: I have had the dent as long as I can remember, I’m 42 years young! Is there a formal name for my “condition”? I suspect what we are looking at here is in fact a dent. My only other theory is that my forehead maybe high on my right side thus giving the appearance of a dent toward the back right side? Thank you very much for your time.

A: You at an ideal candidate for a small skull reshaping operation. You do, in fact, have a high forehead dent or groove in the bone. It has no other formal name although it lies parallel or may be over the original coronal skull suture. Thus it may be a malformation of the coronal suture where the two edges of bone come together to fuse. Regardless of its etiology, it can be treated by a minimally invasive cranioplasty procedure. By making a very small scalp incision (less than 1 cm.) the tissues over and around the dent can be elevated. Then through a small tube, a bone cement material can be injected and then smoothed out from the outside as it sets. This could be done under local/IV sedation with really no recovery other than a small amount of swelling. The ‘trick’ to this procedure is to not overfill it and get the entire area smooth and flat. You don’t want to trade off a ridge for a dent.

Dr. Barry Eppley

Indianapolis, Indiana

Q: Dr. Eppley, I had skull reshaping with bone cement last year in South Korea as my back of head was pretty flat. Since then I wasnt told that much information and may have put pressure on the left side of the back of my head, and now the left side is flat. can you fix this and is it safe to re apply more bone cement on top? 

A: Since skull reshaping bone cement is permanent and does not move or degrade, the appearance of flatness on one side of the back of your head has nothing to do with what you did. (put pressure on it) This flatness has likely reappeared because all of the swelling has finally gone done and the complete result of the skull augmentation procedure is not evident. In other words, the application of the bone cement was likely not symmetric. When correcting a total flattening of the back of the head, the hardest thing to do surgically is to get both sides even. (symmetry) This is not a rare postoperative problem.

The good news is that this is a very correctable skull problem through the application of more bone cement on the flatter side. There is no problem with placing new bone cement on top of older or pre-existing bone cement in skull reshaping surgery.

Dr. Barry Eppley

Indianapolis, Indiana