According to Healio, research showed similar outcomes for extracapsular tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy and intracapsular tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy in pediatric patients with OSA.
“This study reinforces the findings that [extracapsular tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy (ETA)] and ITA have similar outcomes on short-term follow-up in treatment of OSAS in children and that both procedures remain adequate options in otherwise healthy children,” Pamela Mukhatiyar, MD, pediatrician at the division of pediatric respiratory and sleep medicine, The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and colleagues wrote. “To our knowledge, this study is the first to support performing ETA over ITA in patients with comorbid diagnoses of both asthma and obesity.”
Mukhatiyar and colleagues retrospectively analyzed the medical records of 89 children who underwent either ETA (n = 52; mean age, 7.5 years; 60% obese; mean apnea-hypopnea index [AHI], 17) or ITA (n = 37; mean age, 5.2 years; 30% obese; mean AHI, 24.1) at a pediatric hospital by performing a search of the billing codes within the hospital for adenotonsillectomy and polysomnography. Thirty-eight percent of the patients in each group had asthma.
