Presurgical satisfaction with facial appearance in orthognathic surgery patients

Orthognathic surgery and orthodontic therapy are most often performed to improve the patient's appearance. However, not all patients are satisfied with the result though the procedure may be considered successful by the orthodontist and the maxillofacial surgeon. It has been suggested that the patient's satisfaction with his or her facial appearance before the surgery can predict later satisfaction with orthognathic procedures. The present study examined the role of several potential predictor variables in satisfaction with facial appearance before orthognathic treatment. The variables, identified in previous research, included severity of facial disharmony, self-concept, psychological distress, gender, age, and socioeconomic status. Questionnaires were gathered from 54 patients in 10 orthodontic practices in Connecticut and New York. Contrary to expectations, gender, age and socioeconomic status failed to predict patients' presurgical satisfaction with appearance. Self-concept, psychological distress, and orthodontists' ratings of total facial appearance (from a lateral view) were bivariate predictors of satisfaction. When all variables were analyzed with a multiple regression analysis, however, only self-concept emerged as a significant independent predictor of satisfaction with appearance. This accounted for 15% of the variance in satisfaction. Orthodontists' ratings of facial views, considered here objective measures of disharmony, were predictive neither of satisfaction with appearance nor of self-concept. It is suggested that self-concept may be a predictor of postsurgical as well as presurgical satisfaction with appearance and that self-concept itself may be unaffected by severity of facial disharmony, at least in young adults. Orthodontists may need to pay special attention to those patients with poor self-concept, because these patients may be more likely to report unsatisfactory surgical outcomes.