Long-term outcome of pre- and perinatal management of congenital head and neck tumors and malformations.

Introduction: Congenital head and neck pathology may cause direct postnatal airway obstruction. Prenatal diagnosis facilitates safe delivery with pre- and perinatal airway assessment and management and Ex-Utero-Intrapartum-Treatment (EXIT) if necessary. Fetoscopic airway evaluation can optimize the selection of patients in need of an EXIT procedure.

Parotid carcinoma: Current diagnostic workup and treatment.

In this review we present recent progress in diagnostic workup, prognostic evaluation, treatment options and resulting outcomes. Whenever possible, complete resection remains the mainstay of treatment. Sacrifice of facial nerve branches is reserved for the clinically or electromyographically dysfunctioning facial nerve.

Submucosal purse-string suture as a treatment of leakage around the indwelling voice prosthesis.

Background: Leakage around the indwelling voice prosthesis is an annoying complication of tracheoesophageal speech.

Methods: Twenty patients, who experienced peripheral leakage of the tracheoesophageal fistula, were treated with a purse-string suture. Our aim was to get the patients free of leakage without losing their voice prosthesis.

Prognostic index for patients with parotid carcinoma: external validation using the nationwide 1985-1994 Dutch Head and Neck Oncology Cooperative Group database.

Background: Validation of the prognostic indices for the recurrence-free interval of patients with parotid carcinoma, the development of which was described in a previous report, is needed to be confident of their generalizability and justified prospective use.

Methods: The Dutch Cooperative Group on Head and Neck Cancer database contains 231 patients with parotid carcinoma from six tertiary referral centers who were seen between 1985-1994. This database was used to validate the predictive value of the prognostic indices, PS1 (pretreatment index predicting recurrence) and PS2 (posttreatment index predicting recurrence), in patients with parotid carcinoma.