European Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine

Background: In a clinical setting assessment of airway needs to be simple and convenient3. There is no single test with absolute accuracy to predict difficult airway2. In our study we assessed airway difficulty in elective surgeries for adults by comparing ULBT and MMS individually as well as in combination to that of Cormack-Lehane grading. Method: The single blinded prospective, comparative and observational study was conducted at SDMCMS& Hospital Dharwad. A total of 150 patients aged 18-60 years of either sex with ASA physical status 1,2&3 who underwent elective surgery under general anaesthesia were included. CL grade 3&4 deemed as difficult laryngoscopy. Diagnostic testing was carried out to compare MMS and ULBT with CL grade in predicting difficult intubation. McNemar test was used to compare difference between diagnostic parameters. P-value less than or equal to 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: Demographic data and ASA grades were same for participants. We observed that at 95% Confidence Interval (CI) for ULBT sensitivity (92%), specificity (68%), positive predictive value (93.5%) and negative predictive value (62.96%) was better compared to that of MMS whose sensitivity was 64.8 %, specificity 24%. Also, ULBT had a better accuracy 88% than that of MMS with 58%.  Conclusion: Our study and analysis concluded that the upper lip bite test is good option for predicting difficult intubation than Modified Mallampati Score.