Sunday, Nov. 2, 2025 | 2 a.m.
Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
Parents of babies born with cleft lips and palates can again find specialized care at UNLV, where a dedicated team has returned to offer comprehensive treatment for the complex yet relatively common birth defect.
For years, UNLV provided this care under one roof — until the team was forced to disband after losing state funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, that service is being rebuilt.
“With the growing Nevada population, there is bound to be an increase in those types of patients,” said Dr. James Mah, dean of UNLV School of Dental Medicine. “This is also a very unique condition in the sense that the average cost to repair and manage the cleft lip or palate over the individual lifetime exceeds over $100,000.”
The state this spring restored $1.3 million in funding for the accredited team of cleft and craniofacial specialists. The group is composed of dentists, physicians, nurses, speech therapists, psychologists and social workers.
A baby is born with a cleft lip or palate when their upper lip or the roof of their mouth does not fuse in the womb. Cleft lips and palates can occur alone or together.
They create a characteristic, highly visible split in the face and mouth, and the deformities can cause challenges with feeding, breathing, speech, ear infections and tooth development.
One or both occur in 1 in 500 births, meaning that close to 60 babies a year may be born in Nevada with the condition, Mah said. While clefts are often surgically repaired early in childhood, patients need follow-up care, he said.
With a newly expanded Advanced Needs Dental Clinic at UNLV’s health sciences campus — a buildout that was planned separately but coincided with the team’s return — patients and families can now receive treatment without leaving the state. University and civic leaders met Wednesday at the facility to commemorate the team’s restoration.
Patients of all ages with other conditions — intellectual and developmental disabilities; medical, physical or sensory special needs — that make sitting for a dental procedure difficult can also be accommodated at the clinic. In what used to house dental school business offices, eight spacious treatment rooms are outfitted with people with disabilities in mind.
The rooms and corridors are wide and the lights that usually hover over the treatment chair on swinging, jointed arms are mounted in the ceiling in low-profile housing.
This keeps bulky lamps from getting in the way of patients needing to be assisted out of wheelchairs.
For patients that need to stay in their wheelchairs, or on gurneys, there is one room with no dental chair at all. It is plumbed to deliver anesthetic gases to patients that require deeper sedation or general anesthesia.
Until the money was restored, Alaska and Nevada were the only states that didn’t have any such teams.
Mah said California had four, and they’re stretched thin. But Las Vegas families would still travel to the Los Angeles area, some even sleeping in their cars outside the clinics, to get care they couldn’t get here, he said. He said the Las Vegas waiting list has hundreds of people.
State Sen. Rochelle Nguyen, D-Las Vegas, sponsored Senate Bill 280 to restore the funds.
“A bill number never healed a child’s smile or calmed a parent’s fears. People do that, and tonight is about the dentists, specialists, hygienists, assistants, care coordinators, students (and) researchers who are turning that policy into care. It’s about the families who have advocated for years,” she said.
Kate Korgan, UNLV’s acting executive vice president and provost, said the clinic would put confident, joyful smiles on faces.
“The most important thing we do is, we help solve problems, and the world is full of problems. We know that, and sometimes we get drawn into focusing on the negative and all the challenges that we face,” she said. “But as a university community, our mission is to address the needs of our citizens and to improve the lives of those in Southern Nevada and all across the state, and this clinic is poised to do that in a really remarkable way.”
The Advanced Needs Dental Clinic is at 1700 W. Charleston Blvd., where UNLV’s dental, medical, nursing and other health education programs have facilities, in Las Vegas’ Medical District.
