Surgical Reconstruction of Intracranial Lesions of Cranial Nerves

Abstract

In only a few cranial nerves is direct intervention possible on the nerve itself to alleviate intracranial lesions. This is totally impossible for those cranial nerves which actually are brain appendices such as the olfactory and optic nerves. To the best of our knowledge, attempts at nerve suture or anastomosis of the oculomotor nerves have never been made⁺); perhaps because their path, in the sinus cavernosus, is not accessible to operative approach and their other intracranial paths are reached only with difficulty. Perhaps also owing to the extremely differentiated interplay on the reacting organ, the eye muscle coordination, makes a satisfactory result after nerve suture, unlikely. Yet the possibility exists that merely no one has been interested in this problem. Whatever the case may be, up to now, one had to be satisfied in cases of functional loss of the third, fourth and sixth cranial nerves with a positional correction of the eyeball using surgical manipulation of the eye muscles, primarily an ophthalmological domain with which neurosurgeons are usually not confronted and therefore excluded from this report.