Comparison of microdebrider-assisted inferior turbinoplasty and submucosal resection for children with hypertrophic inferior turbinates

A review of outcomes following inferior turbinate reduction surgery in children for chronic nasal obstruction

“…A total of 730 cases were pooled from the 11 studies evaluated and are summarized in Table 1 [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. The ages of the children ranged from 1 to 17 years at the time of surgery and were followedup for a period of 3 months to 14 years.…”

“…Nine studies were either retrospective reviews of case series or prospective, unrandomised studies. One study randomized the children to either microdebrider assisted turbinectomy or submucosal resection [20]. In another study, radiofrequency volumetric tissue reduction was used in an unrandomised, prospectively recruited cohort of children [21].…”

“…Partial or subtotal inferior turbinectomy was the preferred technique utilized in the studies published in the early 1990s, whilst the use of the carbon dioxide [12,16] or YAG [18] laser was reported in studies published from the late 1990s. Radiofrequency thermal ablation and micro-debrider were used in the more recent published studies [19][20][21].…”

“…Only one study, comparing submucous resection and micro-debrider assisted inferior turbinoplasty, assessed the severity of nasal obstruction using a visual analogue scale which demonstrated a trend toward improved nasal obstruction (Fig. 2) [20]. Four other studies, using a structured questionnaire, reported improvement in scores for nasal obstruction following turbinate surgery [15][16][17]19].…”

“…Apart from subjective symptomatic improvement, Percodani et al [13] and Ducrov et al [14] reported that 27% and 47% of their cohorts respectively had reduced frequency of asthma attacks and disease severity. Only one study used anterior rhinomanometry [20]. The nasal resistance of the surgery cohort (n = 120) were compared with a control group of 10 healthy children.…”