Quality of life before and after different treatment modalities in peripheral facial palsy: A systematic review.

[OBJECTIVES] A systematic review was conducted to investigate the effect of peripheral facial palsy (PFP) on the quality of life (QoL). Secondly, we investigated if different treatment modalities influence the QoL of patients with PFP.

[METHODS] A multidatabase systematic literature search was performed using the following databases: PubMed, Embase, MEDLINE, and The Cochrane Library from the earliest date of each database up to August 2015. The inclusion criteria were either prospective and/or retrospective cohort trials and/or case series measurement of QoL before and after treatment, patients with PFP (irrespective of etiology), and various treatment modalities (medication, physical therapy, botulinum toxin injections, and several types of surgical procedures). Two authors rated the methodological quality of the included studies independently using the Newcastle-Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale for nonrandomized studies.

[RESULTS] Two hundred fifty-eight studies were found, of which 14 studies met the inclusion criteria. Most studies were assessed to be of fair to good methodological quality. The Cohen's κ (between author r.e.l. and s.p.) was 0.68. Eight different questionnaires were used to measure QoL, of which the Facial Clinimetric Evaluation scale was used most frequent. After different modalities, all studies showed significant improvements in terms of QoL.

[CONCLUSIONS] This study found significant improvement when measuring QoL before and after different treatment modalities in patients with peripheral facial palsy. Future research should focus on patients with PFP due to the same etiology and use of valid QoL instruments for outcome measures. Laryngoscope, 127:1044-1051, 2017.