As surgeons, we unfortunately see many dogs with BOAS (brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome). Of these, the vast majority (87 – 94% in various studies) present with a presumed elongated soft palate. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for us to go in there and be surprised that the palate is severely thickened rather than necessarily too long. This problem arises due to the strong turbulence of air and the subsequent irritation that occurs.
A group of surgeons also discovered this and therefore developed a technique to alleviate the problem in 2010 – “split staphylectomy”. The technique involves shortening the soft palate after first splitting it in half and filleting out excess tissue between the mucosal layers. A holding suture is then placed temporarily to hold the layers together, before shortening the palate at each side of the split to the desired length and suturing everything together – usually so that the new soft palate is flush with the back part of the tonsil pocket.
A study recently published in JSAP takes a closer look at this technique to investigate whether it causes more complications than more traditionally used procedures, and the authors have also askes owners to state their level of satisfaction with the animal’s function after a median time of 459 days. The results included 75 dogs, and of those a total of 8.3% developed complications, which is slightly higher than in similar studies using other methods. However, only 2.7% of these complications were classified as severe, which was slightly better than for the other methods . A full 88% of the owners who responded believed that their dog had a greatly improved quality of life – and not least, 88% of the dogs were discharged from the hostpital on the same day. None of them required further hospitalization or a tracheostomy at any time. The latter procedure is known to prolong the convalescence period and significantly increase the complication rate, so this must be said to be an advantage.
Again, the study is unfortunately retrospective, so a prospective randomized study is needed to say with certainty whether one method is better than the other. Until then, we can be aware of the method as a relatively safe alternative where a significantly thickened soft palate is causing problems for the dog. The image is borrowed from the publication, and here is a link to the study: https://doi.org/10.1111/jsap.13485
