English

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy has evolved as the standard of care for the treatment of Gall Stone disease over the past decade. Several patient and procedure related factors have been implicated in setting of failure to complete the procedure by minimal invasive method and various scores have been developed to precisely predict a Difficult Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy. AIMS: The present study was conducted to ascertain various patient related preoperative risk factors for conversion of laparoscopic Cholecystectomy to open method and to validate the Risk Score for conversion. SETTINGS & DESIGN: A total of 100 patients with diagnosis of Gall Stone Disease admitted to our surgical Unit between October 2011 and April 2013 were assessed for various pre-determined risk factors and were accordingly categorized into three levels of anticipated difficulty according to RSCLO and our new scoring system. The patients were then subjected to Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy by the same surgical team and the procedure was then graded as difficult or not according to the pre-defined criteria. The findings were analysed by appropriate statistical analysis. RESULTS: Presence of factors like Male sex, history of attacks of acute cholecystitis, increased GB wall thickness, presence of supra-umbilical abdominal scar, obesity and a contracted GB were associated with a significantly higher rate of conversion to open method. RSCLO was found to correlate better with the outcome in this setting than our New Scoring System. CONCLUSION: Several patient related factors may be helpful in predicting a Difficult Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy pre-operatively. RSCLO Scoring system may be useful as a pre-operative tool to predict intra-operative difficulty during LC.