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Importance of the time interval between surgery and postoperative radiation therapy in head and neck cancer

The ideal time to start postoperative radiation therapy (PORT) in head and neck cancer patients has been an issue of debate. In the USA, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) recommends initiating radiotherapy within six weeks from surgery. The six-week...

Factors affecting the occurrence of salivary fistula after total laryngectomy

It is generally believed that patients should be fed by nasogastric tube for 7-10 days after undergoing total laryngectomy or laryngopharyngectomy to avoid the occurrence of post-operative salivary fistula. This study challenges this belief and looks into various factors that...

Supplementing intranasal cortical steroids with montelukast: does it help?

Intranasal steroids are widely used in the treatment of allergic rhinitis. Whether or not the addition of montelukast helps was assessed in this study. This was a single centre prospective randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial of two groups of patients, one...

Tell me like it is: advice for relatives of people with aphasia

More than a quarter of people who have a stroke present with aphasia immediately post-stroke (approx. 30%) and of these, around 60% experience chronic communication difficulties. Provision of information is seen as one of the top 10 best practice recommendations...

To monitor the nerves or not?

Whilst intraoperative nerve monitoring has become the standard of care for mastoid and parotid surgery, its benefit in thyroid surgery remains unclear. In the UK NICE was agnostic on the subject in 2008, stating that it was potentially helpful and...

Two for the price of one - multiple parotid neoplasms

With advancing years come many benefits, but one drawback is the acquisition of parotid (or thyroid) neoplasms. Conventional teaching is that most are benign and slowly enlarge, and not infrequently are found bilaterally as in Warthin’s. Pleomorphic adenomas are also...

DIY Epley manoeuvre

This is an interesting paper that looks at getting patients to do their own particle repositioning manoeuvre (PRM) after having it done by a clinician (‘Epley’ to you and me although there are some slight differences) once a week for...

Disrupting assumptions: how to teach queer concepts to speech and language therapists

Policy requiring speech and language therapy courses in America to include multicultural content in their courses was only formally introduced in 1994. Yet sexual orientation was still considered a controversial topic at this time, and it was only in the...

Supracricoid laryngectomy revisited

In this article, the authors report on the long-term (five- and 10-year) survival, local recurrence rate and cause of death in a cohort of 46 patients with T3M0N0 glottic carcinoma undergoing supracricoid laryngectomy. The five- and 10-year survival were 78%...