World Journal of Pediatric Surgery最新文献

Background: Living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) remains the only curative treatment for children with end-stage liver disease; however, complications of the procedure are associated with indications for early relaparotomy. Several risk factors associated with early relaparotomy after liver transplantation include pediatric end-stage liver disease (PELD) score, warm ischemia time (WIT), and cold ischemia time (CIT). Our study investigated the incidence and indications of early relaparotomy in postoperative pediatric LDLT recipients and compared the outcomes with patients who did not require relaparotomy.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study of pediatric LDLT recipients from Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital, Jakarta, Indonesia, was collected from 2010 to August 2022. Indications for early relaparotomy were investigated. Factors analyzed in the early relaparotomy group compared with the nonrelaparotomy group included intraoperative blood loss, surgery duration, CIT, WIT, and PELD score.

Results: The highest indication for early relaparotomy was biliary leakage. Most patients who underwent early relaparotomy only had one incidence of relaparotomy (60%). The surgery duration in subjects with early relaparotomy was longer by a median of 3 hours compared with those without early relaparotomy (p=0.289). Intraoperative blood loss was greater in early relaparotomy subjects than in subjects without early relaparotomy (95 vs 77 mL/kg, p=0.552). Other factors, such as PELD score, CIT, and WIT, also showed no significant difference between the two groups.

Conclusion: Biliary leakage was the most common indication for early relaparotomy in our center. There were no preoperative or intraoperative factors that significantly influenced the incidence of early relaparotomy due to the limited sample size and the early advancement of our liver transplant center.

Background: Childhood neurosurgical conditions such as hydrocephalus and spina bifida represent a significant burden of death and disability worldwide, particularly in low and middle-income countries. However, there are limited data on the disease prevalence and delays in care for pediatric neurosurgical conditions in very low-resource settings. This study aims to characterize the delays in access to care for pediatric neurosurgical conditions in Somaliland.

Methods: We performed a retrospective review of all children with congenital hydrocephalus and spina bifida admitted to the Edna University Hospital (EAUH) in Somaliland between 2011 and 2018. Patient demographics were analyzed with descriptive statistics and χ² test statistics. We defined delays in care for each condition based on standard care in high-income settings. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression were performed to evaluate predictors of delay in care. Statistical significance was set at p<0.05.

Results: A total of 344 children were admitted to EAUH with neurosurgical conditions from 2011 to 2018. The most common condition was congenital hydrocephalus (62%). Delays in care were found for 90% of patients and were associated with the type of diagnosis and region. The longest delay among children with spina bifida was 60 months, while the longest delay for children with congenital hydrocephalus was 36 months. Children with congenital hydrocephalus or spina bifida traveling from foreign countries had the highest waiting time to receive care, with a median delay of 8 months (IQR: 5-11 months) and 4 months (IQR: 3-7 months), respectively.

Conclusion: We found significant delays in care for children with neurosurgical conditions in Somaliland. This country has an urgent need to scale up its surgical infrastructure, workforce, and referral pathways to address the needs of children with hydrocephalus and spina bifida.

Objective: The present study attempts to clarify the clinical features of pediatric intra-abdominal solid organ injury at two institutions.

Methods: The injured organ, patient age, sex, injury grade, imaging findings, intervention, length of hospital stay, and complications were retrospectively reviewed using medical records at two centers from 2007 to 2021.

Results: There were 25 cases of liver injury, 9 of splenic injury, 8 of pancreatic injury, and 5 of renal injury. The mean age of all patients was 8.6±3.8 years old, with no difference between organ injury types. Radiological intervention was performed in four cases of liver injury (16.0%) and one case of splenic injury (11.1%), and surgery was performed in two cases of liver injury (8.0%) and three cases of pancreatic injury (37.5%). All other cases were treated conservatively. Complications included adhesive ileus in one case of liver injury (4.0%), splenic atrophy in one case of splenic injury (11.1%), pseudocysts in three cases of pancreatic injury (37.5%), atrophy of the pancreatic parenchyma in one case of pancreatic injury (12.5%), and urinoma in one case of renal injury (20.0%). No mortalities were observed.

Conclusion: Pediatric patients with blunt trauma had favorable outcomes at two pediatric trauma centers covering a broad medical area, including remote islands.

Background: Preoperative imaging assessment of surgical risk is very important for the prognosis of these children. To develop and validate a radiomics-based machine learning model based on the analysis of radiomics features to predict surgical risk in children with abdominal neuroblastoma (NB).

Methods: A retrospective study was conducted from April 2019 to March 2021 among 74 children with abdominal NB. A total of 1874 radiomic features in MR images were extracted from each patient. Support vector machines (SVMs) were used to establish the model. Eighty percent of the data were used as the training set to optimize the model, and 20% of the data were used to validate its accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and area under the curve (AUC) to verify its effectiveness.

Results: Among the 74 children with abdominal NB, 55 (65%) had surgical risk and 19 (35%) had no surgical risk. A t test and Lasso identified that 28 radiomic features were associated with surgical risk. After developing an SVM-based model using these features, predictions were made about whether children with abdominal NB had surgical risk. The model achieved an AUC of 0.94 (a sensitivity of 0.83 and a specificity of 0.80) with 0.890 accuracy in the training set and an AUC of 0.81 (a sensitivity of 0.73 and a specificity of 0.82) with 0.838 accuracy in the test set.

Conclusions: Radiomics and machine learning can be used to predict the surgical risk in children with abdominal NB. The model based on 28 radiomic features established by SVM showed good diagnostic efficiency.

Introduction: There is a paucity of clinical data on pediatric epigastric hernias despite them accounting for up to 6% of all hernia repairs in children. We aimed to provide additional data to supplement those 117 cases of a recent systematic review and to further clarify the role of ultrasound in diagnosing pediatric epigastric hernia.

Methods: We retrospectively included all 60 patients treated for epigastric hernias in children in two tertiary pediatric surgical departments within 12 years. Associations were tested via point-biserial correlation analyses.

Results: Epigastric hernias primarily affected preschool children with a median age of 39 months. The vast majority of patients (88%) presented with swelling that was occasionally (30%) accompanied by pain. Fascial defects could be found during clinical examination in 45% of patients with a median size of 5 mm (95% CI 3 to 10). Smaller defects were less likely to be palpable (r=-0.44, 95% CI -0.08 to -0.7, p=0.021). Likewise, ultrasound was used more frequently with smaller fascial defect sizes (r=-0.51, 95% CI -0.16 to -0.74, p=0.007). Laparoscopic repair was used in 11 patients (19%) and more often (4/11) in combination with another simultaneous procedure than open repair (11/48).

Conclusions: Epigastric hernias are primarily a condition of the preschool child. Ultrasound can be beneficial if the diagnosis cannot be made clinically; otherwise, it is abdicable if it does not change the management of the patient's epigastric hernia. Laparoscopic repairs might be beneficial for children with multiple defects or simultaneous procedures.

Background: High deductible health plans (HDHPs) are associated with the avoidance of both necessary and unnecessary healthcare. Umbilical hernia repair (UHR) is a procedure that is frequently unnecessarily performed in young children, contrary to best practice guidelines. We hypothesized that children with HDHPs, as compared with other types of commercial health plans, are less likely to undergo UHR before 4 years of age but are also more likely to have UHR delayed beyond 5 years of age.

Methods: Children aged 0-18 years old residing in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) who underwent UHR in 2012-2019 were identified in the IBM Marketscan Commercial Claims and Encounters Database. A quasi-experimental study design using MSA/year-level HDHP prevalence among children as an instrumental variable was employed to account for selection bias in HDHP enrollment. Two-stage least squares regression modeling was used to evaluate the association between HDHP coverage and age at UHR.

Results: A total of 8601 children were included (median age 5 years, IQR 3-7). Univariable analysis revealed no differences between the HDHP and non-HDHP groups in the likelihood of UHR being performed before 4 years of age (27.7% vs 28.7%, p=0.37) or after 5 years of age (39.8% vs 38.9%, p=0.52). Geographical region, metropolitan area size, and year were associated with HDHP enrollment. Instrumental variable analysis demonstrated no association between HDHP coverage and undergoing UHR at <4 years of age (p=0.76) or >5 years of age (p=0.87).

Conclusions: HDHP coverage is not associated with age at pediatric UHR. Future studies should investigate other means by which UHRs in young children can be avoided.

Digestive perianastomotic ulceration (DPAU) is a rare complication after intestinal resection and anastomosis occurring at or near the anastomosis site. The purpose of this review is to summarize the characteristics of DPAU, including the etiology, diagnosis and differential diagnosis, clinical manifestations, treatment, and future research. All recent literature on DPAU was searched in PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane and then reviewed. The clinical manifestations of DPAU are mainly gastrointestinal symptoms such as bloody stool and chronic anemia. The diagnosis of DPAU is difficult. Specific diseases, such as Crohn's disease, must be ruled out before a diagnosis can be made. In addition, there are no clear treatment guidelines due to the high degree of heterogeneity in response to drugs and surgery. It is recommended to adjust medication in time and combine various treatment methods. In addition, the mechanism that causes DPAU is not well understood; however, several possible mechanisms have been proposed, such as scar tissue ischemia and underlying diseases. Moreover, there is a high risk of relapses, and a long-term follow-up is necessary. Numerous issues remain to be solved in this area; therefore, more randomized controlled trials and studies should be carried out to further understand this disease.