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A Patient's Guide to Adhesions & Related Pain (part 4)

The Magnitude of the Problem of Adhesions

The rate of adhesion formation after surgery is surprising given the relative lack of knowledge about ADHESIONS among doctors and patients alike.  From autopsies on victims of traffic accidents, Weibel and Majno (1973) found that 67% of patients who had undergone surgery had adhesions.  This number increased to 81% and 93% for patients with major and multiple procedures respectively.  Similarly, Menzies and Ellis (1990) found that 93% of patients who had undergone at least one previous abdominal operation had adhesions, compared with only 10.4% of patients who had never had a previous abdominal operation.  Furthermore, 1% of all laparotomies developed obstruction due to adhesions within one year of surgery with 3% leading to obstruction at some time after surgery.  Of all cases of small bowel obstruction, 60-70% of cases involve adhesions (Ellis, 1997).

Lastly, following surgical treatment of adhesions causing intestinal obstruction, obstruction due to adhesion reformation occurred in 11 to 21% of cases (Menzies, 1993).

Between 55 and 100% of patients undergoing pelvic reconstructive surgery will form adhesions.

The impact of adhesions as a complication of surgery is huge.  In the United States (1993) 347,000 operations for lysis of peritoneal adhesions were performed (Graves, 1995), of which about 100,000 involved intestinal adhesions.  Estimated another way, 446,000 procedures were performed in the U.S. to lyse abdominopelvic adhesions in 1993 (HCIA, 1994).

In 1988, there were about 280,000 hospitalizations for adhesions, the economic cost of which was estimated conservatively as $1.2 billion per year (Fox Ray et al., 1993).

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