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What blood tests should be requested to investigate vocal cord paralysis?

Patients who are discovered to have a vocal cord palsy with no obvious cause on history or examination routinely undergo investigations to exclude an underlying pathology. Cross-sectional imaging of the relevant recurrent laryngeal nerve is required, but considerable variability has...

Airway intervention for epiglottitis

This Japanese study was a retrospective review of 83 patients admitted with epiglottitis over a 9.5-year period. The authors found that the factors that were significantly more likely to be present in patients who received airway intervention were: odynophagia; drooling;...

Inflammation associated with presbyacusis

Inflammaging and presbyacusis is a topic that few audiologists consider in their daily clinical routine due to lack of training in this area. Inflammaging is a chronic state of inflammation present throughout the body. The classic 1965 work by Rosen...

New biomarkers for salivary gland tumours

Salivary gland tumours comprise approximately 6-8% of head and neck neoplasms. Elevated haematological inflammatory markers, such as neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet to lymphocyte ratio (PLR), have been shown to be predictive and prognostic in various malignancies. This...

Why do some people get their smell back so quickly after a COVID infection whilst others don’t?

Of course, we are all too familiar with the effect that COVID-19 infection has on our sense of taste and smell, but why do most patients get better whilst, for many, the misery lingers on and on? This paper looks...