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The purpose of this study is to present our experience on improving the quality of life of patients with facial paralysis due to an operated intracranial tumour, by performing minimally invasive static reanimation procedures. We reviewed the clinical information pertaining to neurosurgical patients with facial paralysis that underwent static reanimation. The study included 11 patients with complete facial nerve paralysis of all nerve branches, that reported different primary complaints upon presentation. The performed procedures consisted of gold plate insertion into the superior eyelid, inferior eyelid ectropion correction or suture suspension. The functional results were favourable in all cases and the resulting appearance was acceptable. The choice of the different techniques used is discussed. Good outcomes are possible using static reanimation with an adequate adaptation of the techniques to the main patient complaint.

Self-inflicted penetrating injuries in patients with mental disorders are a rare phenomenon. The authors report the case of a prisoner who recurrently presented to the emergency department over a period of four years for self-insertion of six metal foreign bodies into the skull. Computed tomography each time revealed the presence of a metal foreign body (screw, nail, metal rod, and wire) passing through the frontal bone into the frontal lobe. In each situation, the foreign body was safely extracted with a favorable outcome. Despite the use of the latest imaging modalities, metal artifacts can limit the assessment of vascular involvement, and special attention must be given to preoperative planning. Surgical extraction of the foreign body can be safely performed when appropriate preoperative planning is carried out to consider all possible complications.

Virulent bacteria could cause gingival fibroblasts apoptosis through lipopolysaccharide release during generalized aggressive periodontitis (GAgP) development and evolution. We showed that treatment with lipopolysaccharide (LPS, 1 μg/mL) for 30 days induced the decrease in the number of cultured rat gingival fibroblasts as compared to control group, which received no treatment. GAgP is considered to have also a genetic etiology, so the aim of our study was to evaluate if some polymorphisms of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFA) and interleukin 1A (IL-1A) genes are associated with GAgP in a sample of Romanian population. We selected a group of 32 subjects (22 cases and 10 controls) for studying the TNFA (-857) polymorphism and 97 subjects (66 cases and 31 controls) for IL-1A (-889) polymorphism. The single nucleotide polymorphisms were genotyped by real-time polymerase chain reaction for all subjects. The genotype and allelic distribution tended to be equally between the cases and the controls group. Similar results were obtained for the dominant and recessive model. The difference between the two groups did not reach statistic significance for neither of the two studied polymorphisms [p=0.76 for TNFA (-857) and p=0.84 for IL-1A (-889)]. The data suggest that TNFA (-857) C/T and IL-1A (-889) C/T polymorphisms are not associated with susceptibility to GAgP in this Romanian population, potentially because of the small sample size. This is the first such study for Romanian northeastern population.