Best method for facial nerve anastomosis.

The facial nerve is divided or sacrificed and grafted in a significant number of patients with a parotid malignancy. Rehabilitation of the face is of paramount importance to the patient and it is essential that efforts are made to restore facial nerve continuity if at all possible. The best of the traditional four methods of facial nerve anastomosis, viz. absorbable sutures, non-absorbable sutures, glue or wrapping have never previously been evaluated as a whole. It was regarded as unethical and impossible to perform a randomised controlled trial using human patients for this study due to the infinite number of variables which have to be considered so an experiment using the facial nerve of the rat was designed.