Primary Closure of the Bile Duct without a T-tube for Treating Biliary Stone Disease

Ryu, Gil O; You, Young Kyoung; Cheon, Joon Sung; Kim, Chung Gu; Lee, Dong Ho; Ahn, Chang Joon

Abstract

PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to examine whether conventional primary closure of the bile duct without routinely inserting a T-tube could be performed after all the surgeries used to treat choldocholithiasis.
METHODS
From April 2002 to July 2005, we retrospectively analyzed 125 bile duct stone disease patients who underwent primary closure of the bile duct.
RESULTS
Wound infection was the most frequent surgical complications, and it showed a higher trend in the patients who had a history of previous biliary operation, and it showed a trend to be slightly higher in the recurrent biliary stone cases than that in the de novo cases. However, these findings were not statistically significant. In addition, surgical complications developed in 16 of 100 patients who were older that 60 years, whereas there was only 1 of 25 patients who developed complications for the patients younger than 60 years. The development of complications has a tendency to be higher for the older patients, yet the level was not statistically significant. In regard to postsurgical hyperamylasemia, although a statistically significant difference could not be detected, this malady developed in 3 of 12 cases in whom endoscopic nasobiliary drainage (ENBD) tubes were inserted. This showed a trend to be higher than that for 13 cases of 113 patients for whom endoscopic nasobiliary drainage tubes were not inserted. Concerning the postsurgical hospitalization period, it was significantly longer in the cases who developed complications (p=0.018), and there was a tendency for a prolonged hospitalization period for the patients who were older than 60 years, for women, recurrent cases and the cases with a history of the bile duct surgery. Yet these had no statistical significance
CONCLUSION
It appears that the primary closure of bile duct is a technique that could be performed safely for all choledocolithotomy patients , and this is regardless of the size of bile duct diameter, history of surgery on the bile duct system, gender, emergency operation, age, recurrent biliary stones, the presence of presurgical nasobiliary drainage tube and the presence of concomitant diseases.