Purpose: Owing to the trend of a nuclear family the concern and protection are still more increasing than before. The patients admitted to hospital for intussusception, as well as their parents, seem to be under great stress when non- operative treatments fail. In order to identify those patients likely to fail an attempted non-operative treatment, and to administer prompt treatment, the patients that came to our hospital for pediatric intussusception were analyzed.
Methods: 285 cases, between 2000 and 2003 were reviewed. They were divided into two groups from their medical records, and retrospectively compared. Group I included 243 pneumoreduction cases and group II 42 operation cases. To find the probability of non-operative treatment failure, an attempt was made to analyze and score the risk factors that increase the possibility of operative treatment.
Results: The factors contributing to an increased possibility of operative treatment were fever, leukocyte count, plain abdominal X-ray findings and duration of symptoms.
Conclusion: This study revealed that fever, leukocyte count, plain abdominal X-ray findings and duration of symptoms contributed to an increased possibility of operative treatment. An increase in the sum of the scores of each factor increased the possibility of operative treatment. This simple scoring system could eliminate excessive and repeated pneumoreduction, thus indicating its potential value as a useful aid in surgical decision making for high failure rate cases of pneumoreduction in intussusception. (J Korean Surg Soc 2004;67:402-406)
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