Botulinum Neurotoxin A in the Treatment of Pharyngocutaneous Fistula after Salvage Surgery in Head and Neck Cancer Patients: Our Preliminary Results
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: To analyze the effect of intraparotid injection of botulinum neurotoxin A (BoNT-A) on salivary production and the course of pharyngocutaneous fistula (PCF) in post-radiation therapy salvage surgery. Methods: A total of 13 patients who had undergone total laryngectomy or pharyngolaryngectomy were treated with BoNT-A to both parotid glands, within three days from PCF onset. The salivary flow was evaluated using a subjective rating scale as the percentage of normal function from 0% (no saliva) to 100% (normal saliva flow), before injection, every day for 2 weeks, and once a week for three months. PCFs were monitored daily. Results: Spontaneous closure of PCF occurred in 7/13 (53.84%) cases 13.6 days (range: 7–18) after treatment; 6/13 (46.16%) patients needed revision surgery. Salivary flow significantly decreased in all patients seven days after injection (from 67.2% to 36.4%; p < 0.05). Patients who had undergone either conservative or surgical treatment did not differ in salivary flow before injection, whereas the mean percentages of salivary flow calculated at each time point after injection were different (p < 0.05). Conclusions: BoNT-A contributed to the closure of the fistula in most of our cases. The subjective perception of salivary flow predicted the closure of PCF. The mean time to closure may contribute to establishing the timing of PCF surgical treatment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".