The clinical threshold for undertaking elective surgery to remove part or all of the colon (colectomy) for people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) may be too high, warn researchers in a study published on bmj.com.
IBD is a general term for chronic inflammation of the intestine and includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Around a quarter of a million people in the UK are affected and many people will require colectomy at some stage. Currently there are about 2,000 total or partial colectomies performed each year in England for IBD.
Death rates following elective colectomy are typically quite low, at least in the short term, while delaying surgery carries increased risks. It is thought, increasingly, that the thresholds for elective colectomy may be too high. However, there is a lack of strong evidence about this.
So researchers from Swansea and Oxford used routinely collected hospital data throughout England to investigate mortality after colectomy for IBD, comparing those who underwent elective colectomy, emergency colectomy, or who were hospitalised for IBD but had no colectomy. The study included 23, 464 people who were hospitalised for more than three days for IBD, 5,480 of whom underwent colectomy, and traced all deaths up to three years after hospital admission.
They found improved long term survival for elective colectomy compared with emergency colectomy or no colectomy. The findings also confirmed a substantially increased risk of dying shortly after emergency colectomy.