Side Effects of Adenoid/Tonsil Removal. Avoid Hypernasality

If your child has middle ear infection, your doctor may recommend ear tubing to avoid hearing loss. In some countries doctors also encourage the parents to remove the adenoid (lymph tissue located in the upper airway behind the nose)/ tonsil. There are reports that removing adenoid tissue concurrent with placement of ear tubes can reduce the risk of recurrent ear infection and the need for repeat surgery. There are also several websites claiming there is no serious side effects of tonsil or adenoid removal. In this article, I would like to share with you few scientific research articles that highlights the side effects of adenoid removal.

Donnelly et al. published a scientific article in IRISH JOURNAL OF MEDICAL SCIENCE and reported that persistent hypernasality is observed in patients who had their adenoid removed. Hypernasality is the excessively nasal speech resonance, which may result in unintelligible speech. The reason is emission of too much air through the nose, because the patient has the adenoid removed. However, this is not very common as it occurs only 1 in 1,500 procedures.

Readers who would like to read more I would like to recommend the following two research articles.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/3k15971t055845m2/

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007122671800413

Hence, avoid risking your child get hypernasality. If your child has constant ear infection, get the ear tubing done, but avoid removing adenoid. It is my belief that every organ in our body has its function. If the medical science couldn't find a function for an organ, it doesn't mean the organ is functionless.