The International BVFP Registry

Introduction Bilateral vocal fold paralysis (BVFP) is a rare disease with an iatrogenic cause in most of the cases. The main treatment available for this condition is surgical glottal enlargement (48 %), which effectively restore the air patency in the majority of the patients, although at the expenses of their voice quality. Being a rare disease, BVFP diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up are not standardized and hugely vary from hospital to hospital and from country to country. In an attempt to improve the standardization of this procedure, we are conducting an international registry in Germany, Austria, Ukraine, Spain, and UK to compare procedures and outcomes.

Methods Data are collected both retro- and prospectively. The registry was approved in 2015. At abstract submission, 329 retro- and 59 prospective cases have been collected.

Results The evaluation of the retrospective data showed that although the main symptoms of BVFP are moderate to severe respiratory problems, the diagnosis is mostly based on videolaryngo(strobe)scopy than on spirometric parameters (23 %). Also, even if BVFP patients generally show an impaired voice before treatment, there is a lack of collection of both objective, e.g. Voice Range Profile (31 %), and subjective, e.g. Roughness, Breathiness, Hoarseness (35 %) or VHI (18 %) outcome measures. Only 20 % of the patients are followed-up for 3m post-treatment and this percentage drops below 10 % within the successive 2 years.

Conclusions The lack of standardized diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up procedures for BVFP is expected to negatively affect the prognosis of this disease. The evaluation of prospective cases, for which Quality of Life evaluation is foreseen, should help to improve the current status to the benefits of the patients.

Poster-PDF A-1517.PDF

Publication History

Article published online:
10 June 2020