The Impact of Septoplasty on The Quality of Life
Abstract
Purpose of Study: The principal aim of this study was to evaluate the patient reported outcome of septoplasty alone. While there are various objective investigations available to assess the post operative affects of septoplasty as well as subjective outcome reports of septoplasty in combination with various additional nasal procedures, there is a lack of necessary standanderized subjective parameters to assess the outcome of septoplasty on its own merit.
Study Design: It’s a Cross-sectional retrospective medical outcome study.
Materials and Methods: Sixty (60) patients who underwent septoplasty alone over a two year period were included in this study at Sligo General Hospital, Sligo, Republic of Ireland from 1st January 2005 to 31st December 2006. Patients who had any additional nasal surgical procedure at the same time as septoplasty such as submucous diathermy, turbenectomy or functional endoscopic sinus surgery were excluded. This was done so as to exclude the bias of other nasal surgical procedures which may also have an additional impact on the improvement in the quality of life of the patients.
A questionnaire was created to answer specific pre operative and post operative questions. A comprehensive chart review was done and patients were contacted for a phone interview for any information that was found to be deficient in the chart. These included relief of nasal obstruction, improvement in mouth breathing, headaches, anterior nasal secretions, post nasal drip and any alterations in the sense of smell. Scoring of the nasal symptoms was done using the validated Fairley nasal scoring scheme. All post operative information was compared to pre operative status.
Results: Our study revealed that there was an improvement of 95.8 % in nasal obstruction, 85.4 % in mouth breathing, 56.9 % in improvement of sense of smell,
75.2 % in headaches, 56.6 % in post nasal drip and 71.4 % in anterior nasal discharge. Overall improvement was 79.2%.
Conclusion: Our study concluded that septoplasty alone has shown 79.2% improvement in the quality of life. Unfortunately, it was revealed from literature search that no such study has been conducted on the effects of septoplasty alone on the quality of life. Therefore
It is required to do more studies on septoplasty alone to see its effects on quality of life as there is a gap in research for such study.
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