Clinical efficacy of anal fistula plug treatment regimens in anal fistula patients

Abstract

Aim: Anal Fistula Plug (AFP) is considered as a new promising technique in treating anal fistula patients, mainly due to it could maintain the integrity of patients’ integrity and decrease patients’ discomfort with a simple operation. It also is beneficial to the following surgical options if needed. However, the underlying clinical efficacy is still unknown. Herein, we aimed to investigate the clinical efficacy of AFP in anal fistula patients by a retrospective analysis. Methods: We collected 52 anal fistula patients from the 2nd affiliated hospital of Wenzhou Medical University and the hospital of traditional Chinese and Western medicine in Wenzhou between August 2012 and July 2016. Among them, 25 patients were treated with AFP, while 27 patients were treated with incision-thread-drawing. After treatments, all patients were evaluated by analyzing the differences on postoperative pain, cure rates, healing time, scar area and anal sphincter function at the subsequent follow-up. Results: The results showed that there were significant differences on postoperative pain between the two groups (P<0.001). Further, the healing time in patients with AFP treatment was remarkably lower than those with incision-thread-drawing treatment (P<0.05), whereas the anal scar area and the functional score of anal sphincterin patients with AFP treatment was markedly higher than those with incision-thread-drawing treatment (P<0.001). Nevertheless, the cure rates were not obviously different between the two groups. Conclusions: Taken together, these data suggested that AFP procedure could notably alleviate postoperative pain, shorten healing time, and retain anal sphincter function as compared to incisionthread- drawing procedure.