Papers of the Week

To study the long term outcome of endoscopic septoplasty with microdebrider assisted inferior turbinoplasty (MAIT) versus medial flap turbinoplasty (MFT). The present study was conducted in the Department of ENT, Government Medical College, Amritsar. Patients with symptomatic persistent nasal obstruction were recruited from ENT outdoor clinics. The nasal obstruction was persistent despite medical therapy that included a minimum 4 weeks. The study was primarily a double blinded prospective randomized control study including 120 patients, where all patients enrolled at odd numbers were taken for endoscopic septoplasty with microdebrider assisted inferior turbinoplasty and all patients with even numbers were taken for endoscopic septoplasty with MFT. Patient-scored nasal obstruction (1-5) along with blindly assessed nasal airway patency ratings (1-4) was done at 3 and 24 months postoperatively. A total of 120 patients were recruited in the study. The mean ages of the MAIT and MFT groups were 28.61 ± 14.8 and 30.25 ± 8.36 years, respectively. Average follow-up period was 21.9 ± 6.3 months. Nasal obstruction was improved in both techniques at 3 months, but after long term follow up, it was highly significant for MFT along with improvement in preoperative symptoms  < 0.001. No patients complained of worsening of their obstruction. Nasal patency at 24 months, a significant proportion of patients had a greater nasal assessment by a blind assessor with 97.1% in MFT and 81.9% MAIT with mild to no obstruction. In MAIT group 16.6% had pain/discomfort, 23.6% had discharge which were the major complications, but crusting (MAIT 10% and MFT 3.3%), adhesions (MAIT 13.8% and MFT 1.6%). The medial flap inferior turbinoplasty (MFT) is technically straight forward procedure that provides long term more effective and satisfactory the patient in relieving nasal obstruction, without significant risk of complications. The long term follow up of MAIT is required as there was increase in need of decongestion and they might require second procedure as MFT.