Journal Reviews archive for January 2017

Voice therapy is an effective treatment for presbyphonia

1 January 2017 | | Aged vocal fold atrophy, Multidimensional analysis, Vocal function exercises, Voice therapy

The quality of an individual’s voice often declines with age. This deterioration occurs firstly as a result of vocal fold atrophy secondary to histologic alteration of the vocal fold mucosa as well as atrophy of the laryngeal musculature. Phonatory efficiency...

Gamma Knife surgery for persistent or recurrent trigeminal neuralgia

1 January 2017 |

Treatment of trigeminal neuralgia continues to be challenging. The treatment options include pharmacotherapy, or failing this, surgical options like microvascular decompression (MVD), radiofrequency ablation, pencil beam convolution and Gamma Knife surgery. The authors of this article have presented a series...

Active intervention in small schwannomas associated with higher incidence of long-term hearing loss

1 January 2017 |

This article represents collaborative data of hearing outcomes from tertiary centres in Norway and the United States. They studied data of patients with less than or equal to 3cm vestibular schwannoma who underwent observation, primary microsurgery and Gamma Knife surgery...

Surgery of vestibular schwannomas with peritumoral oedema

1 January 2017 |

This is an interesting retrospective study evaluating peritumoral oedema on magnetic resonance images and correlating it with the intra-operative tumour characteristics and outcome. The study results found that vestibular schwannomas with peritumoral oedema were associated with greater incidence of hypervascularity...

Describing the most useful OSA assessment?

1 January 2017 | | sleep endoscopy, drug-induced sleep endoscopy, DISE, sleep nasendoscopy

This article sets out to comprehensibly describe drug induced sleep endoscopy and its role in determining the level of obstruction in patients with OSA. The advantages described include the fact that other techniques, including Muller’s manoeuvre, have significant variation in...

Surgical options for children with OSA

1 January 2017 | | Sleep-disordered breathing, Sleep apnea, Obstructive sleep apnea, Pediatric, Adenotonsillectomy, Lingual tonsillectomy, Midline glossectomy, Supraglottoplasty, Turbinoplasty, Tracheostomy, Drug-induced sleep endoscopy, DISE, Distraction osteogenesis

This paper looks at the surgical management of OSA in children and approaches the method of patient selection initially. They discuss the role of polysomnography in that it is part of the AAOHNS criteria in those patients with OSA symptoms...