Guillotine and dissection tonsillectomy in children.

Abstract

Tonsillectomy as an outpatient or same day-stay procedure is becoming increasingly popular. A retrospective study was performed on 1,049 children who underwent tonsillectomy and adenotonsillectomy either with guillotine or dissection with snare method. The dissection method was performed both under general anaesthesia and with local anaesthesia, but the guillotine method was performed only with local anaesthesia. Generally, bleeding control required no special intervention in the guillotine method but haemostasis was achieved by ligation and electrocauterization in one-third of the patients in the dissection group operated under general anaesthesia. The greatest percentage of haemorrhage in both methods occurred within the first four post-operative hours. There was a 1.8 per cent incidence of severe reactive haemorrhage required surgical intervention in the dissection group operated under general anaesthesia, but there was no such case in the guillotine group. The results of this study show that in carefully selected children guillotine tonsillectomy with local anaesthesia is a safe, time saving and cost-effective procedure.