Safe extraction of an impacted open safety pin from the esophagus: report of 9 cases.

Purpose: Foreign body ingestion is a common problem in children. An infrequent ingested item is an open safety pin (SP), which may become lodged in the esophagus and presents the endoscopist a challenge to his surgical judgment and technical skills.

Materials And Methods: We present 9 cases of infants with open SPs impacted in the esophagus and discuss the different options to treat these cases.

Percutaneous tracheotomy in bone marrow transplant patients with severe thrombocytopenia.

Objective: Evaluation of percutaneous tracheotomy in bone marrow transplant patients with severe thrombocytopenia.

Design: A retrospective outcome study.

Patients: A retrospective study of 26 percutaneous tracheotomies was performed at the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, Israel.

Reading performance in children with otitis media.

Objective: To examine whether middle ear diseases and the associated hearing loss in early childhood affect reading performance later at school.

Study Design And Setting: One hundred and sixty children, 6.5 to 8 years of age, were enrolled in this study: 80 children with a history of recurrent infections and/or prolonged periods of effusions of the middle ear before the age of 5 years, and 80 healthy children without any history of middle ear disease.

Delayed diagnosis of tracheoesophageal prosthesis aspiration.

In 1980, Singer and Blom published the results of their study on use of the tracheoesophageal puncture prosthesis for restoration of voice after total laryngectomy. Since then, the placement of tracheoesophageal puncture prostheses has been an integral part of rehabilitation after laryngectomy. Complications of this procedure have been recognized and are usually minimal.

Bilateral tinnitus due to middle-ear myoclonus.

Tinnitus is a common otological symptom. Usually it is subjective (perceived only by the patient); very rarely is it objective (heard by both the patient and the examiner) Objective tinnitus due to middle-ear myoclonus is extremely rare, with only a few case reports published in the literature. We present three cases of objective tinnitus caused by middle-ear myoclonus.