Quick Appendectomy for Kids Beats Waiting

Feb. 21, 2010— -- Surgery within a day for children with a perforated appendix reduced the time before they returned to normal activities compared with waiting until peritoneal contamination cleared up, researchers reported.

Early appendectomy was also safer than the so-called interval appendectomy, in which the procedure is planned for up to eight weeks after diagnosis, according to Dr. Martin Blakely of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, and colleagues.

The finding -- which "definitively favors early appendectomy" -- comes from a single-center randomized trial of the two options, the researchers reported online in Archives of Surgery.

The study "may put an end to a long-standing controversy," according to Dr. Marty Makary, an associate professor of surgery and public health at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who was not part of the study.

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It "provides strong evidence to operate as soon as possible," Makary commented in an e-mail to MedPage Today and ABC News. "Removing the appendix as the source of an infection can often provide instant relief and sometimes dramatic improvements in the patient's well-being."

Although there is consensus that immediate surgery is the right choice unperforated appendix, there has been no similar agreement on the correct approach to a perforated appendix, seen in about 30 percent of appendicitis cases in children in the U.S., Blakely and colleagues noted.

On one hand, the early appendectomy relieves the disorder within 24 hours of diagnosis, at the risk of missing alternative diagnoses, they noted. On the other hand, waiting allows peritoneal contamination to resolve, with a potential for improved outcomes.

To test the issue, they studied 131 patients under 18 with a diagnosis of perforated appendix, with 64 randomly assigned to early and 67 to interval appendectomy.