A new Finnish study shows that antibiotic treatment is a reasonable alternative to surgical intervention for many patients with appendicitis. Five years after treatment with antibiotics at almost two thirds of the patients had a second attack.
For many decades, the inflamed Appendix is tried to be removed urgently, fearing that complications (e.g. rupture) threaten the patient’s life. But progress in the field of computer tomography, has facilitated a process of identifying the Appendix can rupture and identify patients that can be treated without surgery.
The results of the researches of the Finnish scientists show that almost two-thirds of the patients threatening complications and can be treated with antibiotics.
Feasible, effective and safe treatment option, says Dr. Paulina Salminen (Salminen Paulina), the study’s lead author and a surgeon at the University hospital of Turku (Turku University Hospital) in Finland.
Her study of adult patients is the prolonged monitoring of patients who took at appendicite drugs instead of surgical intervention, and it confirms previous studies on this issue. The work also showed that antibiotics can be effective treatment for some children with appendicitis. ResulttablecollectionJournal of the American Medical Association.
The editorial Board argues for this reason that a new era has dawned in the treatment of appendicitis allows to do without most of the operations to remove the Appendix.
The study involved about 500 adult citizens of Finland who did a CT to rule out serious cases of appendicitis.
Then half of them were treated with antibiotics, and the other is operated.
Of the patients who were treated with antibiotics, 100 people within five years of treatment is still surgery – most likely because of the alleged recurrence of appendicitis in the first year. Seven of them don’t actually have appendicitis, and probably in their case it was possible to avoid surgery. The results show that the success rate of antibiotic treatment was almost 64%.
Every fourth of the operated patients subsequently develop complications, including infections around the incision, pain in the abdomen and hernia, compared to 7% of complications in patients treated with antibiotics. Patients treated with antibiotics, on average, spent fewer days in hospital than the operated patients. They received within three days of antibiotics in hospital and then seven more days took them home. In the first year of the cost of treatment was about 60%. The analysis of the costs over five years were not included in the published results.
Dmitry Kolesnik