Tonsillectomy--clinical consequences twenty years after surgery?

Tonsillectomy (T) is one of the most common surgical procedures performed on children. Long-term follow-up studies concerning its consequences are lacking. This study is the first study done on a group of patients that underwent T in their childhood, about 20 years ago. The investigation is a cohort study, which followed-up 18 patients who were tonsillectomized 20 years ago. It was to be determined whether these subjects suffer from more respiratory tract infections (or other infections) today, than people who are not tonsillectomized. A group of 54 age-matched subjects were selected for comparison. A questionnaire was mailed to the study population. No significant differences were found between the groups in the frequency of upper respiratory tract infection (URI). The mean number of URI's was approximately [MSOffice1]2.5 per year in both groups. The duration of the URI's was identical in each group. A high temperature was present to the same extent in each group. Absence from work, number of visits to physicians and the use of antibiotics were the same in each group. However, the prevalence of chronic disease was greater in the T-group than in the comparison group. The difference was significant with a Relative Risk of 9.41 and a Confidence Interval differing from 1 (1.13<RR<78.14) for the T-population to develop chronic disease. Because of the small number of the present study population, the results must be validated by further immunological and epidemiological studies on long-term effects of tonsillectomy.