Fibreoptic Laryngoscopic Assessment of Patients with Hoarseness: A Cross-sectional Analysis

Hoarseness is a common clinical manifestation of laryngeal diseases. The cause of hoarseness may not always be a simple inflammatory disease, but it can be from other serious life-threatening conditions such as laryngeal cancer, for which a delay in diagnosis of such condition may compromise treatment, resulting in poor prognosis and a decreased survival rate. Against this background, we evaluated the causes of hoarseness using fibreoptic laryngoscopy in our environment.

This was a cross-sectional study of patients with hoarseness attending ENT clinic of our institution. Ethical clearance and consent were obtained. A questionnaire was used to collect relevant clinical data, fibreoptic laryngoscopy was carried out, and the data was analysed using the Statistical Products and Service Solution version 20.0.

The study recruited 90 patients with hoarseness. The age of the patients ranged between 18 and 70 years with a mean of 40.1 ± 14.8 years. There were 51 (56.7%) males and 39 (43.3%) females. About 46 (51.2%) of the patients had intermittent hoarseness, whereas 44 (48.8%) had persistent hoarseness. Most of the patients, 49 (54.4%), had hoarseness for less than 6 months before presentation. The fibreoptic laryngoscopic findings were non-specific laryngitis 49 (54.5%), laryngeal tumor 20 (22.2%), vocal cord polyp 7 (7.7%), laryngeal papilloma 6 (6.7%), vocal cord palsy 5 (5.6%), and others 3 (3.3%).

Laryngeal tumour constituted a significant percentage of fibreoptic laryngoscopic findings in patients with hoarseness after nonspecific laryngitis. Therefore, fibreoptic laryngoscopy is recommended for all patients with hoarseness in order to detect sinister pathology early.