Important Appendectomy News

A new study says laparoscopic appendectomy is better than traditional open appendectomy for your obese patients.

The study, published in the July issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, found that obese patients had fewer complications 30 days after a minimally invasive laparoscopic operation as compared to an open procedure.

Researchers found that obese patients who underwent traditional open appendectomy had longer hospital stays and higher rates of complications, such as wound infections, pneumonia, heart attacks and septic shock. Overall, the laparoscopic procedure was associated with a 57% reduction in morbidity compared with the open procedure in obese patients.

"There are early studies that suggest the laparoscopic approach may be less risky in obese patients, but there's not much recent information available to strongly prove it," says lead study author Rodney J. Mason, MBBCh, FACS, associate professor of surgery at Keck School of Medicine.

The researchers note that appendectomies are among the most common types of operations in the United States and that more than 35% of U.S. adults and 17% of youth are obese. "We expect to see more and more obese people with medical conditions that require general surgical intervention" says Dr. Mason. "We need to know what approach works best for these patients."

Dr. Mason doesn't expect that all surgeons will jump to perform laparoscopic appendectomy, which is still relatively new and more technically challenging than the open procedure. "It depends on the surgeons' training and whether they were trained to perform laparoscopy or not," he says. "Many surgeons are more inclined to perform laparoscopic procedures because that's how they were trained."

Dan O'Connor