Surgical treatment of pharyngeal atresia.

Congenital pharyngeal atresia is a very rare gastrointestinal anomaly, with only seven cases of complete pharyngeal atresia having been reported. Five of these cases were autopsy reports and success in surgery to enable oral ingestion was not reported even for the two surviving cases. This is a report of a 1.5-year-old boy with complete congenital pharyngeal atresia who was saved by an emergency tracheostomy directly after birth, and on whom we performed surgery to reconstruct the pharyngeal cavity and prevent re-occlusion and restonosis. Approximately four years after the surgery, no restenosis of the pharyngeal cavity has been observed, and the patient is capable of orally ingesting ordinary meals and breathing and vocalizing by closing the tracheal lumen for nearly satisfactory results.