Journal Reviews
Transoral coblation surgery – a viable option for early laryngeal cancers involving the anterior commissure?
Transoral laser microsurgery is widely considered to represent the ideal treatment modality for early (T1a) laryngeal cancers. With disease involving the anterior commissure however, radiotherapy is often advocated on account of perceived superior voice and airway outcomes, plus potential difficulty...
How quality improvement helped to create local guidelines for good tracheostomy care
Significant morbidity and mortality is associated with tracheostomy insertion. A complex, multistep process exists to help patients towards decannulation. This process is often complicated by patient comorbidities, discontinuity of care and communication as patients move through hospital, and variable experience...
Nodal metastasis from thin tongue tumours
This is a retrospective study over the course of 7 years, in which 240 patients were assessed. All had excision of a T1/T2 tongue primary tumour with an elective neck dissection of level I–IV with or without reconstruction. Radiotherapy was...
Emergent surgical airway in head and neck conditions
This systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 1011 surgical airways in 14 studies. Of these airways, 50 were cricothyroidotomies. The mean complication rate was 16.8% with an airway-related mortality rate of 0.2%. They noted that the odds of complication significantly...
Outcomes and progress of a well-designed one-stop head and neck lump clinic
With increasing caseload of head and neck cancer and the fact, as reported by UK Government in October 2024, that over half of these cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage, the need for early diagnosis and prompt management is...
25 years of forearm free flaps – 1 vein or 2?
This is a prospective 25-year study from 1998 to 2023 of 368 forearm free flaps, 314 of which were radial and 54 ulnar in 364 patients. Of these, 68 had 1 venous anastomosis whilst 238 had 2. These were assessed...
Frozen sections; a systematic review
This systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 5 studies assessing the impact of intraoperative frozen section analysis on final margin status, locoregional recurrence and survival in patients with an oral squamous cell carcinoma. The analysis showed no significant difference in...
Biometric facial recognition after bimaxillary surgery
This paper aimed to assess the facial recognition capability of a commercially available software program in patients who’d undergone orthognathic surgery. It is a retrospective study of 24 patients, 12 class II and 12 class III dentofacial deformities. The preop...
Adjuvant radiotherapy for locally advanced (T3–4) major salivary gland cancer – survival benefits quantified
Complete surgical excision of major salivary gland cancers (MSGCs) is the current mainstay of curative treatment for this disease. Indications for postoperative radiotherapy according to current UK national guidelines include high-grade tumours, advanced-stage (stage 3–4) tumours, involved resection margins, perineural...
Management of peritonsillar abscesses – should we be offering a hot tonsillectomy?
Peritonsillar abscesses (PTAs) are one of the most common reasons for patients being referred to ENT services on an emergent basis worldwide. The conventional treatment for adult patients with a PTA in the UK involves needle aspiration or incision and...
You’re under arrest, you damned post-tonsillectomy bleed!
Tonsillectomy is a common, well-tolerated procedure most commonly performed in children for recurrent tonsilitis and sleep apnoea. Post-tonsillectomy bleeding (PTB) is a relatively uncommon complication that poses significant risks to patients and high rates of readmission and reintervention. Institutional guidance...
Endolymphatic sac surgery (ESS) revisited
Ever since the destructive articles by Toss and coworkers, ESS was considered a taboo. However more and more centres are reviving it and report favourable results in properly selected patients. In this article the authors conducted a retrospective, single-centre observational...
