Effects and Related Factors of Endotracheal Intubation on Voice Change Following General Anesthesia

Ha, Il Woo; Kim, Mun Cheol; Lee, Sang Jun; Kim, A Ri; Chang, Jin Soon; Jun, Byung Hoon; Choi, Ick Soo

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
Reliable studies about the impact of short-term intubation, particularly as part of general anesthesia, are scarce. That scarcity led to the following research objectives. First of all, we tried to find out how often and why voice change last more than 72 hours after intubation conducted for general anesthesia.
SUBJECTS AND METHOD
The study enrolled 80 patients who were due to undergo general anesthesia at the Seoul Paik Hospital from Aug. 2009 to May 2010. The patients were examined through stroboscopic examination and voice analysis before surgery. Three days after the surgery, the same tests were performed again to single out patients whose results were abnormal; thus a proportion could be calculated. The other objective was to determine the factors involved with voice change. This was done according to the Mallampati classification, using the images from laryngoscopy and compiling records of cuff pressure, cuff volume, tube size, duration of intubations, and the number of intubation trials.
RESULTS
7.5% of the patients suffered from voice change longer than 3 days. Three factors, namely, cuff pressure, duration of anesthesia and patient age demonstrated statistically significant relationships among them.
CONCLUSION
The results indicate that there is a need for patients scheduled to face general anesthesia to receive sufficient explanation about the possible postoperative voice change that could last longer than 3 days. Furthermore, surgeons and anesthesiologists need to cooperate closely by taking the patient age, duration of anesthesia and cuff pressure into account in order to limit postoperative voice change to the minimum extent.