Sunshine Sentinel

• The lifetime cost of managing acute sinusitis is $38,515.
• The management of sinusitis in the United States exceeds $11 billion per year overall.
• There are minimally invasive treatment options for sinusitis that can provide long term results and reduce your healthcare costs in return.

Dr. Matthew Blair of Gulf Coast Breathe Free said a balloon sinuplasty is a minimally invasive treatment that can open your sinuses and improve your symptoms.

"This takes less than a minute for each sinus. What that does is it permanently opens the sinuses so we can get treatment into the sinus," Blair said. "The sinus is then prevented from being blocked from whatever the cause may be whether it is anatomic or an inflammatory cause from a condition the patient might have that they cannot control."

Chronic sinusitis is a condition where the sinuses, the spaces inside your nose and head, become inflamed and swollen for a period of three months or more, according to the Mayo Clinic. This disrupts the normal drainage of mucus, leading to nasal congestion and difficulty in breathing through the nose. As a result, individuals may experience a stuffy nose, and the area around their eyes may feel tender and swollen. They listed the triggers to be infections, the presence of nasal polyps (abnormal growths in the sinuses) or inflammation of the sinus lining. Both adults and children can be affected by this condition.

If you leave chronic sinusitis untreated for a long time, the personal costs can be expensive. A study published to PubMed noted that the lifetime cost of managing sinusitis amounted to $38,515. Some of these variables include cost of antibiotics, as well as time lost from work.

The American Academy of Otolaryngology reported that approximately 1 in 8 adults in the United States are affected by sinusitis, leading to more than 30 million diagnoses each year. They also noted that the management of acute and chronic sinusitis incurs a direct cost of over $11 billion annually, including everything that goes into it.

Instead of paying for the constant fees that come with sinusitis, you can seek long term treatment options that are minimally invasive and will save you money in the long run. One of these treatment options are known as balloon sinuplasty, which is a safe and minimally invasive procedure utilized by surgeons to address chronic sinusitis, according to Nuffield Health. During the process, doctors insert a guide wire equipped with a small balloon into the nostrils and navigate it to the area of blockage.

If you think you could benefit from a minimally invasive sinus treatment to improve your quality of life, take this Sinus Self-Assessment Quiz.