Revista de medicina pulmonar

New approaches to reconstruct the laryngeal recurrent nerve after injury during thyroidectomy

Chala Andres

Thyroidectomy is the most common procedure in head and neck surgery. The NRL might be inadvertently injured in one to three percentage of the cases. The consequent morbidity is related to disphonia and glottic insufficiency that may last for a long time and usually affects quality of life and increases health care costs. The best treatment is prevention, but once the lesion is stablished, if possible, any effort to reconstruct the nerve must be done. Different techniques have been proposed with variable results. I present the experience with different techniques and proposed the reconstruction of a loop of the vagus nerve to the recurrent as a novel technique with promising results