The Safety of Intraoperative Colonic Irrigation for Single Stage Procedure in Emergency Based Left Colonic Pathology

Kim, Bum Ryul; Shon, Dae Ho; Jang, Byung Ik; Jung, Moon Kwan; Shim, Min Chul; Kim, Jae Hwang

Abstract

Staged procedures are preferred to single stage procedures in emergency based left colonic obstruction or perforation because of the safety. PURPOSE: To evaluate whether the single stage procedure in emergency based left colonic pathology is not safe.
METHODS
We compared medical records of single stage procedure (SP, n=22 male; 10, mean age: 60+/-17, range: 26-82 Yrs) with Hartmanns procedure (HP, n=23 male; 13, mean age: 58+/-16, range: 18-90 Yrs) and diverting loop colostomy (DC, n=19, male; 12, mean age: 59+/-19, range: 19-80 Yrs) in these 4 years. All the patients were admitted via emergency room. Intraoperative colonic irrigation method with newly developed irrigation device (MITech co., Ltd, Seoul, Korea) was used for SP. APACHE III scoring system was applied to evaluate the physiologic status of the patients. Preoperative data were compared with the 1st and 3rd postoperative day (POD).
RESULTS
There were no statistically significant differences in patient demographics and preoperative APACHE III scores. The improvement of APACHE III score was significant in SP and DC on the 3rd POD from 29.6+/-20.9 to 22.9+/-10.2 and 25.7+/-13.3 to 21.4+/-14.8 (P<0.05). There was also a significant improvement in DC (25.7+/-13.3 to 21.9+/-12.9, P<0.05) on the 1st POD, however, there was only a tendency of improvement in SP (29.6+/-20.9 to 26.1+/-12.3) without statistical significance. The scores in HP showed no improvement on the 1st and 3rd POD. There were 3 operative mortalities in HP and one in DC.
CONCLUSIONS
Our results suggest that the safety of the single stage procedure with newly developed colonic irrigation device is comparable to palliative decompressive loop colostomy and better than Hartmanns procedure in emergency based left colonic pathology.