Rare and innovative surgery on patient’s jawbone successful, health ministry says

By Evie Andreou

Health Minister, Constantinos Ioannou on Friday congratulated state medical staff and services of his ministry for carrying out a rare innovative implant surgery on a patient’s jawbone.

The surgery involved the replacement of a patient’s temporomandibular joint (TMJ) with an artificial, custom-made implant. The temporomandibular joint acts like a sliding hinge, connecting the jawbone to the skull.

The case concerned a patient who was experiencing difficulty in chewing, pain and eventually immobilisation of one of his TMJs following chemotherapy for the treatment of cancer a few years ago.

The surgery, which the health ministry described as “innovative”, took place last week when a team of Cypriot doctors from the Nicosia general hospital’s clinic of Maxillofacial Surgery, under the guidance of the clinic’s head, Dr Georgios Pantelas, successfully replaced the patient’s TMJ with an artificial implant.

“In order to carry out the surgery, the Maxillofacial Surgery clinic had continuous communication for more than two months with a specialised centre abroad, where it was extensively studied and pre-operative planning and preparation took place,” the ministry said in a written statement.

The centre abroad that makes TMJ implants, in full cooperation and coordination with the Cypriot medical team, the ministry said, prepared a custom-made three-dimensional artificial joint for the patient.

Pantelas told the Cyprus Mail that such operations were not that common and that this was the first time such an operation took place in a state hospital in Cyprus.

What was remarkable in this case, he said, was that the patient did not have to go abroad, as, the Cypriot team sent the centre in question a CT scan of the patient and they custom made the implant with the use of technology.

Following this successful cooperation with the centre abroad, more operations like these could take place in state hospitals, he said. “There is experience, infrastructure and equipment,”  Pantelas said.

The health ministry said that this “radical intervention highlights the excellent level of health services provided by doctors in public hospitals.”

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.