Nasal polyposis “indicates the presence of out-of-control inflammation at the nasal level,” explained Dr. Luca Malvezzi, specialist in Otolaryngology and Cervical Facial Surgery in Humanitas, during a radio interview.
A pathology that affects “dramatically the quality of life of those who suffer from it” and that affects about 8% of the European population.
What symptoms and who suffers from them
Nasal polyposis is often related to asthma and allergic rhinitis and in many cases “affects people who are already frail in the respiratory tract,” Malvezzi explained.
Among the main symptoms are difficulty and obstruction of the respiratory tract, mucus, loss of sense of smell and headaches.
These are symptoms that initially tend not to worry patients, but the risk is to be underestimated: “If you have, for example, a cold that lasts longer than ten days you need to turn to an ear. We must not underestimate this type of symptom,” explained the doctor again. “And my advice is to go to large clinical centers, because clinical and multi-disciplinary vision is essential today,” Malvezzi suggested again.
Treatment: therapy or surgery
“Being visited by more than one specialist, who completes the clinical picture and then diagnoses the therapy, is very important” and above all it is necessary to “avoid “do-it-yourself treatments with cortisone or vaso constrictor drugs: these are drugs dramatically used in Italy, which are sold without a prescription, but which have important side effects and but can be harmful in the long term”, explained Dr. Malvezzi.
For a long time it was preferred to intervene in a surgical way to solve the problem of nasal polyposis. Even today, of course, surgery is still necessary in some cases. However, “today the in-depth study of the patient is very important” because “each of them has different immunological characteristics: it must be studied at the nasal and pulmonary levels, it is necessary to understand what is its immunological structure and what are, if any, the allergies it manifests”. “We are talking about precision medicine, in order to be able to guarantee the patient a personalised intervention and targeted therapy”, concluded Malvezzi.