Acute cholecystitis in high surgical risk patients: percutaneous cholecystostomy or emergency cholecystectomy?

Background: Percutaneous cholecystostomy (PC) is an alternative treatment in acute cholecystitis (AC) in high-risk or elderly patients although its advantage over emergency cholecystectomy has not yet been established.

Study Design: AC prospective database analysis in high-risk patients treated by PC (group 1, 29 patients) or emergency cholecystectomy (group 2, 32 patients). Surgical risk was estimated by physiological POSSUM, Charlson, Apache II, and American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) scores.

Treatment of symptomatic macromastia in a breast unit.

Background: Patients suffering from symptomatic macromastia are usually underserved, as they have to put up with very long waiting lists and are usually selected under restrictive criteria. The Oncoplastic Breast Surgery subspeciality requires a cross-specialty training, which is difficult, in particular, for trainees who have a background in general surgery, and not easily available. The introduction of reduction mammaplasty into a Breast Cancer Unit as treatment for symptomatic macromastia could have a synergic effect, making the scarce therapeutic offer at present available to these patients, who are usually treated in Plastic Departments, somewhat larger, and accelerating the uptake of oncoplastic training as a whole and, specifically, the oncoplastic breast conserving procedures based on the reduction mammaplasty techniques such as displacement conservative techniques and onco-therapeutic mammaplasty.

Surgery of cosmetic sequelae after breast-conserving therapy.

Although a considerable number of patients have an unfair cosmetic result after breast-conserving therapy, which correlates with poor psychosocial functioning, surprisingly, really only very few patients undergo surgical correction. The purpose of this article was to report our experience in the surgical treatment of such patients and analyze a special subgroup which required bilateral reduction mammaplasty because of associated symptomatic macromastia and their desire to reduce their breast size. From July 2000 to November 2008, some 23 patients consulted for unsatisfactory cosmetic outcome after breast-conserving therapy, fourteen of them accepting the surgical treatment proposed and these were operated upon.