Which Surgical Method is Superior for the Treatment of Parotid Tumor? Is it Classical? Is it New?

We aimed to compare the incidence of parotid tumors seen in our region in the last ten years with the literature values and to compare the recently proposed new parotidectomy methods with classical parotidectomy methods which we applied for ten years.

37 females and 36 males total 73 patients who made parotidectomy between 2008 and 2018 were included in the study. The patients age, sex, histopathological diagnosis, surgical methods applied to malignant or benign tumors and side of the disease were recorded. Histopathological results and the results of surgical methods applied were compared with literature.

The mean age of the 73 patients underwent parotidectomy was 54±34. Of the cases, 57 (78%) cases were benign and 16 (22%) were malignant. Histopathologically benign masses were found 3.5 time more common than malignant masses. The sides of diseases were observed at the near rates (right, left; 52%, 48%, respectively). The most often detected benign neoplasm was pleomorphic adenoma with 42 (74%) cases. The most often detected malignant neoplasm was mucoepidermoid carcinoma with 6 (43%) cases. As surgical method, superficial parotidectomy was applied to 64 (88%) patients, total parotidectomy to 9 (12%) patients and the neck dissection to 7 (10%) patients.

We recommend that to be applied the superficial parotidectomy as the smallest procedure to be performed in the surgery of parotid tumors and to be avoided from partial superficial parotidectomies. In short, we advocate to classical methods for the parotid tumor surgery.