While general surgeons can operate on any part of the body, hernia, gallbladder, colon and breast surgeries are among the most common general surgery operations, said Dr. Only seven types of emergency surgery account for 80 percent of the total costs, deaths and complications of all emergency surgeries in the United States. They are admitted to hospitals for general emergency surgery, a group that includes patients at higher risk and more serious illnesses. Finally, we examined the distribution of surgeries over the days of the month to determine if more surgeries tend to be performed at the beginning or end of the month. In the study, researchers ranked surgeries according to how onerous they were in general, determined by the number of procedures that were performed, the cost of the operations, and the mortality and complication rates.
According to new research published in JAMA Surgery, just seven types of procedures account for about 80 percent of all hospital admissions, deaths, complications and costs attributed to general emergency surgeries across the country. The mortality rate for this type of surgery was 0.08 percent (the lowest of all surgeries among the seven major surgeries) and the complication rate was 7.3 percent. There are several different surgeries that can leave abdominal scars, such as appendectomy or tubal ligation (a procedure in which a woman's fallopian tubes are tied to prevent future pregnancies), Cohn told Live Science. If left untreated, abdominal adhesions can cause serious complications, which can make it risky to treat them with emergency surgery.
As a result, this surgery has one of the lowest frequencies on the list, but it has one of the highest complication and mortality rates. The most common reason for an obstruction actually stems from previous surgeries, namely scar tissue, Shah said. These seven emergency surgeries tend to be performed on patients who are considered to be at high risk, according to the study. By restricting this subsample to surgeries performed in the middle of the month, measurement error is reduced by identifying the number of deaths that occurred within 6 weeks after surgery. He said future research must identify why these particular surgeries are so onerous and what can be done to improve outcomes.
Surgeries to remove a person's appendix, operations also called appendectomies, were the most common emergency surgeries, but they also had a very low mortality rate, according to the study.
