Child behavior and quality of life before and after tonsillotomy versus tonsillectomy

Intra-Capsular Tonsillotomy by Ultrasonic Method

“…It has to be distinguished from physiological pediatric palatine tonsil hyperplasia [7,8] which is not a sign or consequence of recurrent inflammation [9,10]. Also, children with tonsil hyperplasia do not suffer from acute tonsillitis [11,12] or middle ear infections [13].…”

Tonsillotomy: it's time to clarify the facts

“…Class II procedures were associated with tonsillar regrowth after a mean and median length of 19 months ''several months after PITA'' [50], or ''usually during the first or second postoperative year'' [33]. Tonsillitis following Class I procedures was reported to have occurred within the first 6 months [26], 1-17 months [25], after 20 months [10], within 4 years [28], or 10-14 years [30]. Recurrent tonsillitis after Class II procedures occurred after 3-9 months [42], within 12 months [34], or within 18 months [50].…”

“…Reichel et al [23] stated, ''in Germany TT is strictly contraindicated in patients with recurrent throat infections''. A total of 14 authors (35.9 %) excluded patients with a history of tonsillitis for Class I [10,11,16,23,24,26] or Class II procedures [14,39,41,[44][45][46][47]49]. Despite these concerns, Chan et al [52] included patients if they reported two or fewer episodes of streptococcal pharyngitis per year.…”

“…Johnston et al [42] explicitly performed microdebrider-SIPT to treat tonsillitis, with or without hypertrophy, in 191 adult patients and finally performed secondary TE in 4 (2.1 %) of them. In the study of Ericsson et al [26], evidence is given that TT is capable of treating patients suffering from tonsillitis without any adverse events in the 1-year follow-up.…”

“…These statements are not supported by the vast majority of studies. In only 15.4 % of all studies, patients older than 8 years of age were excluded for Class I [11,23,26] or Class II procedures [31,35,43]. Insufficient information about the age distribution was provided by two authors [33,50].…”