Tongchun Mao (毛彤春)
Deputy Director & Head of Aesthetic Surgery · Vice Chief Physician, Licensed Aesthetic Attending · Lead Physician of This Site
Mandibular angle resection · planning around the canal that carries the nerve to the chin · the masseter reattachment and the width that can return
Dr. Tongchun Mao is an aesthetic surgeon at Chongqing West District Hospital, where he is Deputy Director and Head of Aesthetic Surgery in its Plastic Surgery & Aesthetics Medical Center and the responsible physician for this site. He personally performs more than 700 operations a year, within hospital standards of assessment, anaesthesia and follow-up.
His assessment for an angle resection begins with the two structures the operation is built around rather than with the amount of narrowing the patient hopes for: where the canal carrying the nerve to the chin runs through the mandible, and how much bone would remain around it after the planned cut. He establishes which part of the angle is producing the width, because reducing the outer cortex and reducing the corner are different operations, and he plans the conservative end of what the imaging allows. He tells every patient before consent that numbness of the chin and lower lip is expected, that the swelling hides the width for months, that the masseter reattaches and can thicken again, and that a further reduction is possible while a reversal is not.
Clinical focus
Two structures decide the plan, not the shape you asked for
How much of an angle can be removed is set by where the canal carrying the nerve to the chin runs inside the mandible, and how close the operation can safely come to the vessels that supply the face. A plan built from a desired width rather than from those two findings is a plan that can end in permanent numbness or in a bleed in the floor of the mouth. The measurement comes first, and it frequently produces an amount smaller than the patient expected.
