Society of Black Academic SurgeonsNegative appendectomy: a 10-year review of a nationally representative sample
Section snippets
Methods
A retrospective study was conducted using data from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) from 1998 to 2007. The NIS is the largest all-payer inpatient care database in the United States. It contains data from approximately 8 million hospital stays each year. Information during this time period contained data from up to 38 states and it is approximately a 20% stratified sample of all US community hospitals.
The inclusion criterion was patients with appendectomy defined by International
Results
In the 10-year period between 1998 and 2007, there were 475,651 cases of appendectomy that were identified. Of these, 56,252 were negative appendectomies (11.83%). Extrapolation to nationwide figures shows that there were 28,033 cases of NA in 1998 and 21,375 cases of NA in 2007. The incidence of NA in 1998 was 14.7%; this decreased steadily to a rate of 8.47% in 2007 (Fig. 1). Women accounted for the majority of the population having negative appendectomies (40,290; 71.3%) whereas men
Comments
This study shows a steady decline in the rates of NA over the past decade, and also shows that despite this decline in NA there was a corresponding decline in the rates of appendiceal perforation (Fig. 2). We also found that although women were affected disproportionately by NA, they are less likely to die. The most common discharge diagnosis for patients who underwent NA was abdominal pain in the RLQ, indicating that no abdominal pathology was found intraoperatively. Ovarian cyst was the most
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