Abstract
Description of airway difficulties and their subsequent (either successful or unsuccessful) handling may be a matter of lengthy prose. The involved morphological and functional elements, the severity of the airway related problems, as well as the possible technical means to cope with them may consist of many details. Therefore a different airway difficulty formula would be useful, which describes and summarizes features related to airway difficulty in a morphological and functional context. The information encrypted in the airway difficulty formula presented here should be more descriptive (eventually on the expense of accuracy in strictly quantitative terms) and also should enable the reader to imagine suitable alternative techniques of oxygenation and airway securing for the indicated specific problem. The herein proposed “FRONT” airway difficulty formula is very simple, short but contains the essential information for future handling of the case. The formula is composed by 5 capital alphabetic characters (F for “face”, R for “row of teeth”, O for “oral cavity”, N for “neck” and T for “trachea”) indicating the place of manifestation of airway related problems (called here “categories”), which in turn can be amended with an ordinal scale of subscript numerals (0, 1, or 2) that roughly indicate a degree of severity. The formula represents concentrated information about a difficult airway that has been encountered by the reporting person. Besides it can be used as a predictor for a difficult airway if the patient is examined in the frame of the pre-anesthetic evaluation by an anesthetist.
Biro, Peter