A cleft usually formed before birth. Clefts that occur in the oral-facial region often involve the lip, the roof of the mouth (hard palate) or the soft tissue in the back of the mouth (soft palate). Two major types of oral-facial clefts are cleft lip/palate and isolated cleft palate, which are congenital deformities caused by a failure in facial development during gestation.
A cleft lip or palate can be treated with surgery shortly after birth with highly successful results. Cleft lips or palates occur in somewhere between one in 600 and one in 800 births. The terms hare lip or hair lip are sometimes used colloquially to describe the condition because of the resemblance of a hare's lip. A microform cleft is a very minor cleft where no surgery is required to correct it. A microform cleft can appear as small as a little dent in the red part of the lip or look like a scar. Joaquin Phoenix for example has a microform cleft (see famous people with a cleft below).
f only skin tissue is affected one speaks of cleft lip. Cleft lip is formed in the upper lip as either a small gap or dent in the lip (partial or incomplete cleft) or continues into the nose (complete cleft). Lip cleft can occur as one sided (unilateral) or two sided (bilateral). It is due to the failure of fusion of the maxillary and medial nasal processes (formation of the primary palate).
Cleft palate is a condition in which the two plates of the skull that form the hard palate (roof of the mouth) are not completely joined. The soft palate is in these cases cleft as well. In most cases, cleft lip is also present. Palate cleft can occur as complete (soft and hard palate, possibly including a gap in the jaw) or incomplete (a 'hole' in the roof of the mouth, usually as a cleft soft palate). When cleft palate occurs, the uvula is usually split. It occurs due to the failure of fusion of the lateral palatine processes, the nasal septum, and/or the median palatine processes (formation of the secondary palate).
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