Analysis of Maxillary Sinus Ventilation

Abstract

and Its Impact on Asthma (ARIA) classification by correlating it to nasal eosinophilia as an objective tool. The secondary objective is to compare a Visual Analog Scale (VAS) assessment of severity to the ARIA classification. METHOD: Study design is cross-sectional correlational. We used specific serum IgE positivity along with other inclusion criteria. Nasal scrapping was done to evaluate nasal eosinophilia. We used VAS for subjective scoring of severity of the disease. Patients in the 4 ARIA classification subgroups were compared for all items. RESULTS: Our study included 33 patients. 63.6% had Persistent Allergic Rhinitis (PAR) and 26.4% Intermittent Allergic Rhinitis(IAR) with 15.1% mild and 85% moderate to severe form. Comparison for age, gender, allergen specific sensitization, asthma and severity according to ARIA criteria revealed no difference for all items. PER rated poorer (p0.002) than IAR on VAS while nasal eosinophilia was not significantly different between the 4 groups (p 0.792). CONCLUSION: Our study failed to show significant correlation between the nasal eosinophilia and the ARIA classification subgroups. The ARIA classification of AR reflects symptoms duration but does not seem to correlate with the severity of underlying inflammation. We found a correlation between the severity assessed by VAS and the IER and PER subgroups. The result of this study may open the discussion on the rationale behind the pharmacological options in ARIA recommendations.