Parental craniofacial cephalometric features of Chinese patients with nonsyndromic isolated cleft palate

To evaluate the parental craniofacial morphology in Chinese patients with sporadic nonsyndromic cleft palate, 175 parental pairs of children with nonsyndromic cleft palate (NSCP) and 206 controls from Sichuan University were involved in this study. Conventional cephalometric analysis was used to measure angles, linear distances and their ratios. Two-sample Student's t-tests and multivariate discriminant analysis were applied to the data. The data indicated that fathers of children with NSCP tended to have longer anterior cranial base length, palatal length, mandibular body length, mandibular ramus length, and longer mandibular height, lower face height, as well as larger nasal width, palatal width, mandibular body width, and condyle distance (p < 0.05). Mothers of children with NSCP tended to have longer mandibular body length, mandibular ramus length, and longer mandibular height, lower face height, as well as larger nasal width, palatal width, mandibular body width, and condyle distance (p < 0.05). The results indicated that the healthy parents of the patients with NSCP show distinct characteristics in craniofacial morphology. In general, the characteristics seem to be more distinct in the fathers of cleft patients than in the mothers.