Time elapsed between the onset of abdominal pain and appendectomy and the risk of complications

Abstract EN

Objective: Acute appendicitis is the most common indication for urgent intra-abdominal surgery.

Risk of complications increases as time elapses from onset of disease to treatment.

It is challenging to establish the precise time of symptom onset and to characterize patient’s pre-hospital courses.

The aim of this work was to evaluated the time elapsed between onset of pain and surgery in relation to the different complications of acute appendicitis.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional designed study.

Setting in Al-Kindy Teaching Hospital from November 2017 to March 2018.

Data were gathered based on questionnaire forum and the collected data concerning the time elapsed from the onset of pain till appendectomy, and the types of complications were analyzed statistically by SPSS version 17 software application, One-Way ANOVA test and Chi-square were used to determine p-value.

Results: From the 100 patients involved in this study, 55 cases were males (55%), and 45 cases were females (45%), with ages range from 15 to 65 (mean age 24 years).

In this study, uncomplicated acute appendicitis were 70 cases (70%) with mean time interval of 37.66 hours, and the complicated acute appendicitis were 30 (30%) of the cases with mean time interval of 111.08 hours.

The mostly affected age groups with the delay in the time were (20-29 years) with mean time interval 77.07 hours and (30-39 years) with mean time interval 71 hour.

Conclusions: We concluded that there is a significant association between the time elapsed from the onset of the symptoms till the operation and the development of complications in acute appendicitis.