鼻閉感と鼻腔通気度との関連

抄録

Questionnaires relating to nasal symptoms were answered by 70 patients with nasal obstruction and 20 normal subjects. The questionnaires consisted of 20 items including various symptoms supposedly caused by nasal obstruction. Examinations such as rhinoscopy, radiography and the measurement of the nasal resistance were also carried out. We realized that patients often regarded the sense of nasal obstruction as the equivalents of such symptoms as necessity of mouth breathing, snoring, the sense of distress, hyposmia, and nasal voice. In the majority the sense of nasal obstruction was well correlated to the value of the nasal resistance. However, patients with high nasal resistance sometimes did not complain of nasal obstruction and ones with low resistance complained of nasal obstruction. The comparison of questionnaires and the results of the examinations drawn from the patients with such paradoxical obstruction suggested the following possibilities.
1) A patient's insistence that a symptom was caused by nasal obstruction.
2) Day-to-day variation of the nasal patency.
3) Errors attributed to instruments, examiners and/or examinees.
4) Sense of changes in the work of breathing.