Abstract
ABSTRACTBackground:The incidence of cholecystolithiasis is approximately 15% of the population. It is believed that between 30-40% of cholecystectomy patients have symptoms after surgery, being changes in bowel habits the most common among them. Aim: 1) Defining the prevalence, and 2) identifying predictors of changes in bowel habits after laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Methods: This is a retrospective cross-sectional study with an initial sample of 150 patients diagnosed with cholecystolithiasis operated between July and September 2014. Patients were submitted to a questionnaire about the presence of gastrointestinal symptoms and changes in stools consistency before and after the surgical procedure. They were divided into two groups (with or without changes in bowel habits) being combined with the following variables: high blood pressure, body mass index, hypothyroidism, adherence to postoperative dietary orientations, previous abdominal and bariatric surgery. Results: The prevalence of changes in bowel habits in the study population was 35.1%. The association between it and gastrointestinal symptoms was demonstrated to be statistically significant (‰2=7.981; p=0.005), and people who did not have gastrointestinal symptoms had 2.34 times the odds of not presenting changes in bowel habits. None of the other investigated factors had shown to be a predictor of risk for post-cholecystectomy changes in bowel habits. Conclusion: 1) There was a high prevalence of changes in bowel habits, and 2) there was association between changes in bowel habits and the presence of gastrointestinal symptoms.
Highlights
I t is estimated that gastrointestinal diseases affect circa 60 million Americans every year
This study aims at: 1) defining the prevalence, and 2) identifying predictors of changes in bowel habits after laparoscopic cholecystectomy
Among the group of participants, for 64.9% (n=72) there was no changes in stools consistency before and after the surgery, while there was a deterioration of stools consistency for 35.1% (n=39)
Summary
I t is estimated that gastrointestinal diseases affect circa 60 million Americans every year. In 2004, it was estimated that 4.6 million hospital admissions, 72 million outpatient visits, and 236 million deaths were related to gastrointestinal diseases[14]. Cholecystolithiasis affects approximately 20% of the Western adult population, of which 15% become symptomatic[9]. In Brazil, in 2014, 130,000 cholecystectomy procedures were performed by the Brazilian Public Healthcare System (Sistema Único de Saúde), 21 million of which in the State of São Paulo[11]. Since its introduction by Mühe[12] in 1986, laparoscopic cholecystectomy became widely popular and is currently considered the treatment of choice for cholecystolithiasis. This alternative has several advantages when compared to laparotomy. All of them have already been well documented in the literature, ABCD Arq Bras Cir Dig 2017;30(1):[3,4,5,6]
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