BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders

Background: Patients undergoing any type of nasal surgery may experience degrees of postoperative olfactory dysfunction. We sought to investigate "when" the olfactory function recovers to its preoperative levels. Methods: In this cohort design, 40 of 65 esthetic open rhinoplasty candidates with equal gender distribution, who met the inclusion criteria, were assessed for their olfactory function using the Smell Identification Test (SIT) with 40 familiar odors in sniffing bottles. All the patients were evaluated for the SIT scores preoperatively and postoperatively (at week 1, week 6, and month 6). Results: At postoperative week one, 87.5% of the patients had anosmia, and the rest exhibited at least moderate levels of hyposmia. The anosmia, which was the dominant pattern at postoperative week 1, resolved and converted to various levels of hyposmia, so that no one at postoperative week 6 showed any such complain. At postoperative week six, 85% of the subjects experienced degrees of hyposmia, almost all being mild to moderate. At postoperative six month, the olfactory function had already reverted to the preoperative levels: no anosmia or moderate to severe hyposmia. A repeated ANOVA was indicative of significant differences in the olfactory function at the different time points. According to our post hoc Benfronney, the preoperative scores had a significant difference with those at postoperative week 1, week 6, but not with the ones at month 6. Conclusion: Esthetic open rhinoplasty may be accompanied by some degrees of postoperative olfactory dysfunction. Patients need a time interval of 6 weeks to 6 months to fully recover their baseline olfactory function. Background Since the joy of foods and/or beverages is highly correlated with their odor, any degree of olfactory dysfunction negatively impacts one's sense of well-being and content [1,2]. Not only do olfactory impairments alter one's appetite, body weight, psychological well-being, and quality of life [3], but they also compromise one's safety when a certain odor should raise the alarm in such different cases as Published: 3 October 2008 BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders 2008, 8:6 doi:10.1186/1472-6815-8-6 Received: 23 April 2008 Accepted: 3 October 2008 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6815/8/6 © 2008 Shemshadi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.