Background: Gastroesophageal reflux (GER) contributes to periprosthetic leakage after prosthetic voice rehabilitation. However, underlying mechanisms are unclear, and markers predicting anti-reflux therapy response are missing.
Methods: We assessed epithelial-mesenchymal transition in 148 consecutive biopsies from 44 patients with/without fistula enlargement under dual-probe pH monitoring before and after proton-pump inhibitor (PPI) therapy applying immunohistochemistry. Results were correlated with reflux intensity and clinical and histologic findings.
Results: Epithelial-mesenchymal transition correlated with GER in all samples, and patients with fistula enlargement showed higher epithelial-mesenchymal transition scores. Contrary to patients without enlargement, epithelial-mesenchymal transition scores did not regress during therapy in this group. Furthermore, pretherapeutic epithelial-mesenchymal transition scores were lower in therapy responders than in nonresponders without reaching significance (p = .07).
Conclusion: We demonstrate that epithelial-mesenchymal transition correlates with severity of GER and presence of periprosthetic fistula enlargement in patients who underwent prosthetic voice rehabilitation, but epithelial-mesenchymal transition seems to be reversible upon PPI treatment in early stages only.
Keywords: epithelial-mesenchymal transition; fistula; gastroesophageal reflux; vimentin; voice prosthesis.
© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.