Introduction: Cholelithiasis is one of the most common diseases encountered in gastroenterology. Laparoscopic cholecystectomy can be labelled as difficult if the surgery continues for more than 60 minutes or if the cystic artery is injured before ligation or clipping. Predicting difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy can help the surgeon to be prepared for intraoperative challenges such as adhesions in triangle of Calot, injury to cystic artery or gall stone spillage; and improve patient counseling.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we evaluated 269 patients with diagnosed cholelithiasis and planned for laparoscopic cholecystectomy in the general surgery department of Civil Hospital Karachi. After approval of the institution review board of the Civil Hospital, the data of all the patients was collected along with informed consent. The patients were selected via nonprobability, consecutive sampling.
Results: The prevalence of difficult LC during procedure was 14.5% (39/269). Contingency table showed the true positive, negative and false positive and negative observation and using these observation to compute accuracy. Sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV and accuracy of serum c-reactive protein (CRP) in predicting the difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy in patients of cholelithiasis was 87.2%, 97%, 82.9%, 97.8% and 95.5% respectively. Effect modifiers like age, gender and BMI were controlled by stratification analysis and observed that diagnostic accuracy was above 90% in all stratified groups as presented in the following tables. 175 (65.06%) of 279 patients were females indicating female predominance. In general, 41 patients (15.05%) had CRP serum levels greater than 11 mg/dL out of which 34 patients had to undergo difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy (DLC), while 223 out of 228 patients with serum CRP levels of less than 11 mg/dL did not face any difficulty during their cholecystectomy. Similar results have been acquired across all age groups and both genders.
Conclusion: C Reactive Protein is a potent predictor of difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy and its conversion preoperatively. Patients with preoperatively high C Reactive Protein CRP levels in serum have more chances of complication intraoperatively and increased chances of conversion from laparoscopic to open surgery. Preoperative C Reactive Protein (CRP) with values >11 mg/dL was associated with the highest odds of presenting difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy (DLC) in our study. This value possesses good sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV for predicting DLC in our population.
Keywords: c-reactive protein; cholecystectomy; difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy; general surgery.