CRS has long been a suspected risk factor for ETD. However, there have been few studies quantifying the presence of ETD in CRS patients. The researchers sought to determine the prevalence of ETD symptoms in patients undergoing FESS for CRS using the validated ETDQ-7 and to correlate the ETDQ-7 scores with scores of CRS symptom severity based on the 22-item SNOT-22.
Eighty two patients in total completed the surveys. Thirty-nine patients had ETDQ-7 score ≥14.5, signifying clinically significant ETD symptoms. The mean ETDQ-7 score of the study population was 15.8 ± 8.8, and the mean SNOT-22 score was 37.5 ± 19.7. The Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients between ETDQ-7 and the total SNOT-22 score were 0.52 and 0.51 , respectively. There was significant improvement in ETDQ-7 scores postoperatively.
The study concluded that while the association between ETD and CRS has long been known, this is one of the few prospective patient studies evaluating otologic symptoms in a CRS population. We found that a significant percentage of CRS patients suffer from ETD symptoms based on patient-reported subjective outcome measures.
Reference: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1945892420912366
