Highlights from the Current Issue

I hope that everyone is enjoying the change in the weather and the early days of a new season. The holidays are rapidly approaching, giving us time to take stock of our lives and to enjoy the presence of family and friends. With this backdrop, I am thrilled to offer you a series of papers in this November issue and to highlight a few of them that may spark your interest. In our first paper this month, Young and colleagues examine patients with persistent dysphonia secondary to a scar on the vocal folds. In their study, the authors performed preand postoperative analysis of patient-reported, perceptual, acoustic, aerodynamic, and videostroboscopic parameters of 25 patients treated in the office with a single injection of dexamethasone into the superficial lamina propria. With an average follow-up of 14 weeks, Young and associates demonstrated significant improvement in all of these variables following treatment. Given their results, the authors propose that the use of this simple office-based procedure may provide an appropriate alternative for the management of dysphonia in these patients. In our second paper, Abdurehim and colleagues perform a systematic review and meta-analysis examining the relative efficacy of stapedotomy versus cochlear implantation in patients with advanced otosclerosis. After an extensive review of the literature, the authors identified 4 relevant papers that met their inclusion criteria. From their analysis, the authors concluded that cochlear implantation leads to significantly better speech recognition scores than stapedotomy; however, they noted significant variation in outcomes following stapedotomy. In addition, there was no difference in speech recognition scores among patients with successful stapedotomy who also used a hearing aid versus patients treated with cochlear implantation. The authors discuss the implications of their findings but suggest that cochlear implantation may be a beneficial alternative among patients with advanced otosclerosis based its improvement in speech recognition. They further discuss the implications and limitations of their findings. In our third paper, Carr and colleagues examine the presence of decisional regret among parents following tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy in their children, as well as its relationship to other variables, such as perceived outcome of surgery and surgical complications. Using validity measures of decisional conflict and decisional regret, the authors studied 102 families, with a mean child’s age of 6.3 years. Parents were queried about any regret over their surgical decision from 1 to 3 months following surgery. While Carr and associates noted that decisional conflict and regret were low among responders, they did find that decisional conflict was significantly higher in parents who canceled surgery and was associated with the presence of decisional regret among them. The authors suggest that decisional conflict is likely the most important factor among parents that determines the presence of regret over that decision. While this was a preliminary study, the authors discuss the relevance of their findings and the implications for future research. In the fourth paper, Balakrishnan and associates examine the readability and understandability of online resources focused on Zenker’s diverticulum. The authors performed a web search for materials related to Zenker’s diverticulum and analyzed the first 50 webpages that resulted from it. Using standard metrics to assess readability and understandability, the authors concluded that these materials ranged from 10thto 16th-grade reading levels, while understandability ranged from 31% to 74%. The authors suggested that these online resources were written substantially beyond recommended reading levels and were beyond the easy comprehension of a majority of users. With their assessment, Balakrishnan and colleagues suggest that health care providers need to create new patient educational materials that are written at levels more accessible to the majority of the population. Finally, Goldfarb and associates review the head and neck manifestations of eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGP) to guide clinical decision making among otolaryngologists. In this systematic review, the authors performed an extensive search of the literature and identified 28 trials and reports accounting for a total of 1175 patients who were treated for EGP. They noted that among these patients, 48% to 96% presented with head and neck manifestations. Of these patients, almost 96% were responsive to steroid therapy, and 60% required additional adjuvant