Objective And Subjective Outcome Measures in Conventional Curettage Adenoidectomy vs Endoscopic Guided Microdebrider Assisted Adenoidectomy – A Prospective Randomised Single Blind Study

Abstract

Adenoid hypertrophy is a common disease in the community. Adenoidectomy is the definite way of managing the disease, and it is one of the most common surgeries performed in the day-to-day practice of ENT surgeons. This study evaluated the merits and demerits of the conventional curettage method with the microdebrider-assisted adenoidectomy. This single-blinded randomized controlled trial was undertaken to study the Objective and Subjective outcome measures in conventional curettage adenoidectomy versus endoscopic guided microdebrider-assisted adenoidectomy. All the patients were divided equally into two groups based on simple random sampling numbers generated by computer. All the patients in Group A were subjected to adenoidectomy by conventional curettage method with the help of St. Clair Thomson adenoid curette and the patients in Group B were subjected to adenoidectomy with the help of the endoscopic guided microdebrider assisted adenoidectomy.
All the patients were evaluated and compared between the two groups for the amount of blood loss occurring during the surgery, the operative time between the procedures, the presence of the residual tissues in the nasopharynx after the procedure, the recovery time, development of the intraoperative and the postoperative complications, comparison of the pain score on the first and seventh postoperative day between the two groups and the presence of the residual symptoms in the follow-up period.
Although the microdebrider group is associated with increased bleeding during surgery and increased intraoperative time, it is associated with decreased intraoperative post operative complications, fewer residual tissues and improvement of the symptoms in the post operative period compared with the conventional curettage method. Microdebrider-assisted adenoidectomy has proven its importance by complete tissue clearance at the expense of increased bleeding and operative time.