Abstract
The upper airway (UA) is the mucosal lined fibro-muscular tube that connects the nasal and oral cavities with the larynx and esophagus. It performs several different physiologic functions, including vocalization, deglutition, and respiration. Clinicians must be able to recognize incidental findings of non-significance, particularly in children such as the variability in the size of the tonsils and adenoids and the tendency of these structures to reduce in size with age. In older individuals, clinicians should recognize features and preferred locations of specific entities of significance such as the mass effect of nasopharyngeal carcinoma occurring most often in the fossa of Rosenmueller and the extension of both sinus and nasal lesions leading to reduced luminal dimensions or obstruction of the naso-, oro-, or hypopharyngeal airway.
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Melo, S.L.S., Li, Z., Kamburoğlu, K., Scarfe, W.C. (2018). The Upper Airway. In: Scarfe, W., Angelopoulos, C. (eds) Maxillofacial Cone Beam Computed Tomography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62061-9_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62061-9_13
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