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Swallowing the risk: managing dysphagia in aged care

The risk of dysphagia increases with age and the prevalence of dysphagia in aged care facilities is 41–52%. Dysphagia increases the risk of aspiration, asphyxiation, malnutrition, pneumonia and ultimately death. Modifying food and fluids, by providing mashed or pureed foods...

The electromagnetic larynx

Current treatment options for a bilateral vocal cord palsy (tracheostomy, posterior cordotomy, arytenoidectomy) are suboptimal, with a focus primarily on a static means of airway restoration at the expense of voice production and potentially swallow safety. This paper reports on...

Do adhesions actually cause nasal blockage?

All of us who perform nasal surgery are familiar with the disappointing presence of nasal adhesions (NA) or synechiae in our postop patients. These can often lead to patients deriving less perceived benefit from their surgery than that which they...

Should we leave a reconstructed auricle exposed?

Microtia results in psychological and functional morbidity and total auricle reconstruction offers the affected individual a more cosmetically pleasing ear. The art of dressing postoperatively can be heterogenous between surgeons. This single-centre retrospective study based in China compared complication rate...

Sarcopenia and dysphagia in older community-dwelling adults

The prevalence of dysphagia in community-dwelling older adults is reported to be around 15%. Outside of common neurological causes such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease and dementia, recent studies have suggested that sarcopenia may be an independent risk factor for the...

High dose betahistine as effective as, but slower acting compared to intratympanic dexamethasone in intractable Meniere’s disease

The management of intractable Meniere’s disease poses a complex conundrum to otolaryngologists. The focus of treatment is decreasing the severity and frequency of vertigo and tinnitus whilst trying to preserve hearing. Betahistine has been used for many years in the...

Immunosuppresants and ototoxicity

There is a wide range of immunosuppressant drugs ranging from calcineurin inhibitors (e.g. cyclosporine), anti-folic agents (e.g. methotrexate) to anti-TNF and monoclonal antibodies, many of which could be ototoxic. The authors performed a systematic review assessing ototoxicity secondary to immunosuppressant...

Globus, reflux or perhaps both?

We rarely do an ENT clinic without encountering a patient with persistent or recurring feeling of a lump or foreign body in the throat. We are also familiar with patients dreading to hear the C word after the endoscopic examination...