Abstract
Background: The advent of pediatric endoscopic pilonidal sinus treatment (PEPSiT) has dramatically changed the surgical management of pilonidal sinus disease (PSD) in children and adolescents. This study aimed to report the outcome of our new structurated protocol, including PEPSiT, laser epilation, and oxygen-enriched oil-based gel dressing, for treatment of PSD in pediatric patients and describe tips and tricks of the technique.Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the data of 127 pediatric patients, who underwent PEPSiT for PSD in our institutions over a 36-month period. All patients received laser epilation (LE) before and after surgery. Post-operative dressing was performed using silver sulfadiazine spray and in the last 18 months oxygen-enriched oil-based gel. We divided the patients in two groups according to the protocol adopted: G1 (laser + oxygen-enriched oil-based gel dressing) included 72 patients and G2 (laser + silver sulfadiazine spray dressing) included 55 patients. The two groups were compared regarding success rate, recurrence, wound infection rate, wound healing time, post-operative outcome, time to full daily activities and patient satisfaction.Results: No difference emerged between the two groups regarding the average operative time, the average post-operative pain score, the average analgesic requirement, the average hospitalization and the average time to full daily activities (p = 0.33). No intra- or post-operative complications including wound infection occurred in both groups. The patients required an average number of 7 LE sessions (range 4–10) to achieve complete hair removal. The overall success rate was significantly higher in G1 (n = 71, 98.6%) compared with G2 (n = 50, 90.9%) [p = 0.001]. The recurrence rate was also significantly lower in G1 (n = 1, 1.4%) compared with G2 (n = 5, 9%) [p = 0.001]. Furthermore, G1 reported a faster wound healing (average 21 days) compared with G2 (average 29 days) [p = 0.001] and a higher patient satisfaction score (average 4.9) compared with G2 (average 4.2) [p = 0.001].Conclusions: Based upon our experience, PEPSiT may be considered the standard of care for surgical treatment of PSD in children and adolescents. Our new structurated protocol consisting of pre-operative LE, PEPSiT, and post-operative wound management with oxygen-enriched oil-based gel dressing and LE, allowed to achieve an excellent outcome, with a success rate > 98%.
Highlights
MATERIALS AND METHODSPilonidal sinus disease (PSD) is a common disabling inflammatory disease, that mainly affects teenagers and young adults with higher incidence in male gender [1, 2]
This study aimed to report the outcome of our new structurated protocol, including pediatric endoscopic pilonidal sinus treatment (PEPSiT), laser epilation and oxygen-enriched oil-based gel dressing, for treatment of pilonidal sinus disease (PSD) in pediatric patients, to compare it with our previous protocol and to describe tips and tricks of the technique
We retrospectively reviewed the data of 127 consecutive pediatric patients, 55 girls and 72 boys, who underwent PEPSiT for PSD in our institutions over a 36-month period
Summary
MATERIALS AND METHODSPilonidal sinus disease (PSD) is a common disabling inflammatory disease, that mainly affects teenagers and young adults with higher incidence in male gender [1, 2]. The disease may have a very negative impact on quality of life of affected subjects, causing long absences from work or school activities. The treatment of this pathology remains controversial; several techniques, including excision and packing, excision and primary closure, marsupialization, and flap procedures, have been described with different success rates but the gold standard approach has not yet been established [6, 7]. The main problem with surgical treatment, independently from the technique, was the high recurrence rate, up to 30% in some series [1] This high recurrence rate has been mainly attributed to the persistence of hair near the surgical site [1]. This study aimed to report the outcome of our new structurated protocol, including PEPSiT, laser epilation, and oxygen-enriched oil-based gel dressing, for treatment of PSD in pediatric patients and describe tips and tricks of the technique
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