Their function, together with the nose, is to reduce the weight of the facial skeleton and to serve as a sounding board.

The paranasal sinuses (maxillary, ethmoid, frontal and sphenoid) are covered by the same tissue that lines the nose, that is, nasal mucus, and because of this considered as extensions of the nose itself and are subject to the same nasal pathologies. When you catch a common cold, for example, your paranasal sinuses are also involved and in this case can be called acute rhinosinusitis. When the nose goes back to normal, the sinusitis also heals.

However, when there is a distortion of the septum or nasal pyramid, or when a hypertrophy of the turbinates block the sinus outlets, the secretions clog up and get infected, causing acute rhinosinusitis. When these episodes do not heal, or when they occur frequently, chronic sinusitis is determined.

There are, however, types of chronic sinusitis that do not depend on nasal defects but on pathologies of the paranasal sinus mucus itself, as in the case of polyps. For chronic sinusitis or polyps, surgical intervention is needed to clean these cavities.

Currently, this operation is performed from the nose and also in this case, stents are not used. So the procedure is painless and is combined with the correction of the nasal septum and turbinates, or with septorhinoplasty itself. It is thus unthinkable to demand a nasal correction (septum, turbinate or rhinoplasty) without simultaneously treating the sinusitis that would occur later with fever and a clogged nose.