The safety and efficacy of percutaneous transhepatic gallbladder drainage in elderly patients with acute cholecystitis before laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Open cholecystectomy was the standard treatment for symptomatic cholecystitis until the advent of laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Acute cholecystitis was a contraindication for laparoscopic treatment because inflammation and edema made LC difficult [1].

However, accumulated experience and advanced laparoscopic techniques have made LC equivalent to or better than open cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis [2, 3]. The appropriate timing of LC has been controversial until now. In the late 1990s, two randomized trials of early versus delayed LC showed that urgent procedures were safe compared with delayed surgery with respect to the low rate of postoperative complications and conversion [4, 5]. Many studies have reported that if this procedure is performed between 48 and 96 hours from symptomatic onset, the operative difficulty and conversion rate are lower than those of delayed operation [6].

In elderly patients with comorbidities, LC can result in serious morbidity and mortality compared with younger patients [7, 8]. In very elderly patients (≥80 years), it is associated with higher open-conversion rate than those of younger patients [9].

Percutaneous cholecystostomy followed by interval LC was regarded as safe management for pain relief from acute inflammation and a minimally invasive approach that could be employed safely in critically ill patients when difficulty of early operation existed [10].

In the same context, percutaneous transhepatic gallbladder drainage (PTGBD) may be an alternative interim treatment before LC for acute cholecystitis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the safety and efficacy of PTGBD for elderly patients who had developed acute cholecystitis.

There have been many disputes about the safety and efficacy between delayed cholecystectomy after nonsurgical management and early cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis. In the present study, we evaluated the safety and efficacy of PTGBD for acute cholecystitis of elderly patients. The preoperative data for the PTGBD and non-PTGBD groups were not significantly different except the rate of patients with ASA 3 to 4. Although the two groups had no difference in the number of patients with comorbidities, we speculate that the higher ratio of patients with ASA 3 to 4 in the PTGBD group resulted from worse and more concurrent comorbidities relative to those of the non-PTGBD group. PTGBD can allow the relatively ill patients to undergo operation without the increase of postoperative complication and mortality.

The group with delayed LC following PTGBD showed no drawback in the aspects of operation time, blood loss volume, postoperative complications, mortality, and total hospital stay. Moreover, the conversion rate to open cholecystectomy of the PTGBD group was lower than that of non-PTGBD group. Although LC was performed after the "golden 72 hours" in the PTGBD group, the low conversion rate similar to that of previous studies can be attributable to PTGBD [2, 11].

The preoperative hospital stay of PTGBD group was longer than that of non-PTGBD group. On the contrary, postoperative hospital stay of PTGBD group was significantly shorter. Although the total hospital stay of the two groups was not different, we think that the greater frequency of conversion surgeries in non-PTGBD group obviated the postoperative early recovery and discharge.

In a previous study, when the patient was diagnosed with acute cholecystitis, LC had to be performed within three days from symptomatic onset. Furthermore, early LC can reduce conversion rate and total hospital stay, resulting in significant medical and economic benefits [12]. In addition, this previous study found that 20% of postoperative complications could be reduced to 8% in early cholecystectomy within 72 hours. Another previous study suggested that initial conservative treatment followed by delayed operation could not diminish the morbidity and conversion rate for acute cholecystitis [5]. These studies showed that the root cause of conversion was a repetitively progressive inflammation, which was accompanied by distended and edematous walled gallbladder, precluding easy and safe laparoscopic dissection [5, 13]. However, we have some limitations of keeping these aforementioned results. In these studies, early cholecystectomy was compared with delayed cholecystectomy without any bridging treatment such as PTGBD. Delayed cholecystectomy was performed after only medical treatment without any palliative intervention. Also, these studies described that the technique of intraoperative decompression for an edematous gallbladder should be commonly used for the safe dissection and prevention of infected bile spillage [13]. However, now it can be performed preoperatively, like with PTGBD. As a result, operation time could be shortened and bile spillage could be prevented easily.

PTGBD has shown some advantages such as relief of symptoms and inflammation, and successful outcomes [14]. Acute calculus cholecystitis is a common disease caused by obstruction of the cystic duct with stone. Acute inflammation usually starts with the distension of the gallbladder and an edematous change of the wall. Subsequently, acute cholecystitis may gradually progress to be complicated by empyema, perforation, abscess formation, peritonitis, and sepsis. Complicated cholecystitis could occur more commonly in compromised elderly patients who are susceptible to inflammation. In critically ill elderly patients, the placement of a percutaneous cholecystostomy tube allows the patients with comorbidities to recover from the acute illness before proceeding to cholecystectomy [14, 15, 16]. Because elective surgery is safer than emergent surgery, conservative treatment has been suggested to stabilize patients until elective surgery [17]. Surgical cholecystostomy has also been proposed as an alternative to medical treatment or cholecystectomy in order to avoid emergent open surgery [18]. Since the first percutaneous drainage procedure for gallbladder empyema was performed by Radder in 1980, it has become a useful alternative treatment to surgery in operative high-risk patients with acute cholecystitis [19, 20]. Percutaneous drainage seems to be a safe procedure in patients who are incompatible for operation [21, 22, 23]. Furthermore, it has been suggested as a less invasive procedure with low morbidity and mortality rates compared with open cholecystectomy in critically ill patients [24, 25].

PTGBD has been used increasingly as a diagnostic and therapeutic procedure with almost 100% technical success [19]. It is a safe and less invasive method of treatment with a reported procedure-related mortality rate of 0%-4% [20, 26, 27]. PTGBD failure is mainly associated with catheter dislodgement and bile leakage, but severe complications are rare [20, 26, 28]. The transhepatic approach through the bare area of the gallbladder may be superior to the transperitoneal approach, with a lower risk of catheter dislodgement, bowel injury, and bile peritonitis [16]. In our study, the transhepatic approach was chosen for all patients in the PTGBD group, and no patient experienced complications related to this procedure.

In conclusion, we found that LC after PTGBD could be performed with low conversion rate for ill elderly patients. After PTGBD, preoperative hospital stay may increase, however, the total hospital stay does not significantly increase. PTGBD is considered to have an effect of drainage on acute inflammation of the gallbladder and enables LC to be performed safely without the adjacent duct or organ injury.