• Ratko Prstačić, Juraj Slipac, Tamara Živković Ivanović, Ivana Šimić, Ema Babić, and Ana Đanić Hadžibegović.
• 1ENT Department, University Hospital Centre Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia, 2Faculty of Dental Medicine and Health, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia, 3School of Medicine, Zagreb University, Croatia, 4Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, Zagreb University, Croatia.
• Acta Clin Croat. 2020 Jun 1; 59 (Suppl 1): 32-37.

AbstractAutologous fat vocal fold augmentation is a widespread surgical procedure that aims to repair glottal incompetence in patients with unilateral vocal fold paralysis (UVFP). However, there are some concerns in the literature about the long-term results of this technique. At the ENT Department of the Zagreb University Hospital Centre, this technique has been in use for more than 15 years, and a retrospective medical chart review was conducted from June 2005 to November 2019. Overall, 78 patients with UVFP met the inclusion criteria for enrolment in the study. All patients underwent at least one preoperative and two postoperative voice assessments, one early (within 3 months from surgery) and one late (at least 1 year after surgery). All tested voice outcome parameters (maximum phonation time (MPT), jitter, shimmer, noise-to-harmonic ratio (NHR)) significantly improved after surgery, both early and late postoperatively (p<0.001). The reoperation rate was only 10.3% (8/78), with the majority of patients in our series experiencing long-term benefits from this surgical procedure. According to the results of our study, autologous fat vocal fold augmentation appears to be a highly useful and effective surgical technique with long-lasting results in the majority of patients suffering from UVFP.

9 keywords...

hide…