Background: Omental infarction (OI) is an infrequent cause of acute abdominal pain and there is no consensus on whether conservative or surgical treatment is the best strategy when performing positive CT diagnosis.
Objectives: To assess which of the two treatments is the most commonly adopted and compare outcomes in terms of success rate in resolution of symptoms and hospital length of stay.
Eligibility criteria: Case report and case series of patients with abdominal pain and positive diagnosis by CT of omental infarction.
Data sources: PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar in combination with cross-referencing searches and manual searches of eligible articles from January 2000 to June 2018.
Participants: Patients older than 18 years of age.
Methods: Patient characteristics and results were summarized descriptively. Categorical variables were assessed by chisquare test or Fischer's exact test, and continuous variables by the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney or Kruskal-Wallis test. Risk factors for failure of the conservative management were identified using multivariate logistic regression.
Results: 90 articles were included in the final analysis (146 patients). 107 patients (73.3%) received conservative treatment with a failure rate of 15.9% (patients needing surgery) and 39 patients (26.7%) received surgery as first treatment. The mean hospital length of stay was 5.1 days for the conservative treatment group and 2.5 days for the surgery group with statistically significant differences (p = 0.00). Younger age and white blood cells count ≥12000/μl were predictive factors of conservative treatment failure.
Conclusions: Although conservative treatment is effective in most patients, surgery has advantages in terms of hospital length of stay.
Keywords: Acute abdominal pain; Computed tomography; Conservative treatment; Omental infarction; Surgical treatment.
© 2020 The Authors.