Facelift Surgery and Nerve Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Advances in surgical procedures improved the safety profile of aesthetic surgery. Several side effects have been described for facelift surgeries, and nerve injuries are one of the most feared due to their impact on quality of life. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the rate and type of nerve injury during facelift procedures through a systematic review.

PubMed®, EMBASE® and Web of Science® databases were searched for articles on nerve injury rates after facelift surgeries using controlled and non-controlled terms to establish search queries. Three investigators independently assessed the eligibility of publications, first based on the title and abstract and then based on the full text. The DerSimonian-Laird random effects model was used for proportion estimation through a meta-analysis.

A total of 67 eligible publications with a total of 15,404 patients and 15,441 procedures were included in the analysis according to the eligibility criteria. The overall estimated pooled motor and sensory nerve damage rate was 0.66% (95% confidence interval [95%CI]: [0.5%; 0.9%], Z = 6.07, p < .001) and 0.39% (95%CI: [0.2%; 0.6%], Z = 4.16, p < .001), respectively. For permanent neuronal damage, the estimated pooled rates were 0.047% (95%CI: [0.0%; 0.1%], Z = 2.69, p = .007) and 0.045% (95%CI: [0.0%; 0.1%], Z = 2.63, p =.009), respectively, for motor and sensory nerve damage.

The recognition of nerve damage as a serious complication of facelift surgery is increasing, although the estimated pooled rate is less than 1%.

This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors   www.springer.com/00266 .