Who needs surgical-orthodontic treatment?

The indication for surgical-orthodontic treatment is a skeletal or dentoalveolar deformity so severe that the magnitude of the problem lies outside the envelope of possible correction by orthodontics alone. For adults, this means that satisfactory correction by tooth movement is not possible; for children, it means that the problem cannot be corrected satisfactorily by a combination of tooth movement and growth modification. Correction of the dental occlusion is not an adequate description of successful treatment; satisfactory facial esthetics must also result. Extrapolation from existing data for malocclusion in the United States suggests that there are a total of 1.2 million individuals in the present population with problems severe enough to require surgical-orthodontic treatment for satisfactory correction. Of these, 700,000 have Class II malocclusions and 300,000 have Class III malocclusions. Approximately 220,000 individuals have long-face problems and another 220,000 have other problems, but these groups have about a 60% overlap with the Class II and Class III groups.