diagnostic efficacy of fine needle aspiration in parotid mass

introduction: the preoperative diagnostic evaluation of the parotid lesion is a valuable aid in planning the operation and the approach to intervention. among different diagnostic tools, fine needle aspiration has a key role. however, the exact efficacy of this technique in our center had not been thoroughly investigated. materials and methods: between january 2000 and june 2007 a subset of 64 patients who had agreed to undergo preoperative fnab was selected. the fnab diagnoses were compared with those of the surgical specimens as the gold standard. then, sensitivity, specificity, predictive value, and pertinent characteristics of the patients were evaluated. finally, the results were analyzed with spss version14. results: during the study period, 81 patients underwent parotidectomy, only 64 of whom had the fna before surgery, so only the data collected from 64 patients were evaluated. the most common clinical presentation 75% (48 patients) was a parotid mass. the second common presentation was facial paralysis at 17.2% (11 patients), followed by pain at 7.8%.  the result of fna sensitivity was 82.5% and specificity was 93.3%. the accuracy of the test was 87.5%. positive predictive value was 93.3% and negative predictive value was 82.35%. conclusion: fine-needle aspiration cytology is a reliable method in the evaluation of parotid tumors with a fairly high specificity and sensitivity rate.