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"Polite yawning" facilitates recovery of sense of smell after laryngectomy
WESTPORT, Jun 19 (Reuters Health) - A simple nasal airflow maneuver that can be taught in one 30-minute physical therapy session helps nearly half of patients who undergo laryngectomy to recover olfactory acuity.
Dr. Frans J. M. Hilgers, of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a multicenter team developed the method based on information in the literature and their own prior experience with patients who had undergone laryngectomy. The intervention was essentially to have patients yawn "politely," with closed lips.
Speech therapists taught the maneuver to 44 patients who had undergone laryngectomy, and most required only one 30-minute session to learn it. The patients were instructed to yawn as often as possible and were followed-up after a mean of 6 weeks.
Forty-six percent of patients who could not smell (based on olfactory acuity tests) before the intervention developed a sense of smell subsequently. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show a positive effect on the olfactory acuity of patients after laryngectomy by applying a special maneuver," Dr. Hilgers and colleagues say in the June issue of Archives of Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery.
The authors note that many patients with improved olfactory acuity "still did not think that their olfaction was improved." In particular, they reported not automatically smelling odors in their environment. The investigators suspect that patients may need to perform the nasal airflow maneuver whenever they enter a new room or environment to compensate for the loss of passive smelling. |
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