Original articleGeneral thoracicThoracoscopic Sympathectomy for Isolated Facial Blushing
Section snippets
Patients and Methods
From our databases, we identified two groups of consecutive patients who were treated for facial blushing by thoracoscopic sympathectomy at the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Odense University Hospital and Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark, during a 6-year period (January 1999 to December 2004). Objective methods for quantifying blushing before surgery were not applied. The indication for operation was disabling isolated facial blushing as defined by the patient. Only patients with
Results
The two hospitals were comparable with no significant differences in sex (72% were female), age (median, 37 years; range, 16 to 67), hospital stay (median, 2 days; range, 1 to 5), or postoperative hospital stay (median, 0 days; range, 0 to 2). The median follow-up time of all patients was 20 months (range, 1 to 60). No conversion to open technique was necessary, and there was no operative mortality. One patient from Aarhus had temporary unilateral Horner′s syndrome, which resolved after 2 days.
Comment
A recent national survey concluded that the projected prevalence of hyperhidrosis in the United States is 2.8%, equivalent to 7.8 million individuals [14]. There are no published estimates on the prevalence of facial blushing, but it is a cardinal symptom of social phobia, which has a prevalence as high as 10% [6]. Over the last 2 years, more than half of the patients referred for thoracoscopic sympathectomy in Denmark suffered from disabling facial blushing, indicating that this problem is
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