As an aid to stopping smoking e-cigarettes may have a role, but they are heavily promoted by industry as a leisure pursuit and desirable fashion accessory. Sneh Biyani and Craig Derkay gives a thorough account of what we know about...
This is a retrospective review of 281 patients, all of whom underwent elective septoplasty. Simply put, those who smoked displayed a much higher postoperative septal perforation rate than those who did not. So, some cautionary advice for patients undergoing this...
You may well ask what is the novel value of a paper looking at smoking habits in patients with confirmed head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), but this paper highlights some pertinent points for clinical practice in the current...
This Belgian prospective study reported on the effect of paper patching on aural fullness of unknown aetiology. It looked at 22 patients who complained of aural fullness without any middle ear pathology. The patients were divided into a treatment group...
A vocal fold polyp is a benign lesion related to phonotrauma which induces upregulation of inflammatory processes and histological changes can occur in the epithelium and lamina propria. Whether smoking produces additional or enhanced changes is the subject of this...
One would expect that subjects exposed to more passive smoke would have a significantly increased level of rhinosinusitis. This study looked at a reasonable number of sinusitis and control subjects (404 and 165) using hair nicotine as an assessment of...
Definitive diagnosis and management of Patulous Eustachian tube (PET) is unsatisfactory. Several different treatment methods are currently used for PET which itself indicates no satisfactory solution. The objective of this study was to compare the outcomes of two different treatment...
This publication discusses the details and differences between chronic tension type headache and migraine and followed a cohort of 240 patients over 36 months. The authors applied strict criteria to distinguish between chronic tension headache and migraine, these essentially being...
The condition of patulous eustachian tube, as opposed to dysfunctional eustachian tube, is less frequently diagnosed. Symptoms related to this, such as autophony, aural fullness, ‘being under water’, ‘hearing their own breathing’, and hearing sensitivity (varying in either direction) can...
Giacomo Puccini, one of the best known composers of all time, was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and died from the disease in 1924. In this article, Rosario Marchese-Ragona and Alessandro Martini describe Puccini’s experience of the disease with quotes from...
1 September 2014
| Patrick J Bradley (Prof)
|
Head and Neck
This publication is edited by internationally renowned Professor of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Sheng-Po Hao, in the School of Medicine, Fu-Jen University, Taipei, Taiwan. He has organised contributors from many countries, many of whom also work in Taiwan, where...
We learn much of our future by looking at our past; Douglas MacMillan provides us with a fascinating glimpse into his years as a junior doctor. The operating theatre was a somewhat alien environment in the late 1960s: theatre sisters...