The safety and effectiveness of the Le Fort I approach to removing central skull base lesions

The difficulty of gaining access to the central skull base has led to the development of many surgical approaches to this area during the past decade. Yet we believe that the Le Fort I technique, which has been used for almost 140 years in orthognathic surgery, is still an excellent approach to treating anterior skull base lesions. This procedure, which entails the horizontal sectioning of the dentoalveolar maxillary segment, seemed to fall out of favor with otolaryngologists after a few reports of complications surfaced during the past 10 to 15 years. In this article, we report a series of seven patients whom we treated with a Le Fort I approach during a 3-year period for a variety of benign and malignant anterior skull base lesions. We have encountered no significant complications of surgery or recurrence of disease at a maximum postoperative followup of 3 years.