Major stoma related morbidity in young children following stoma formation and closure: A retrospective cohort study

Okay, so over the past five or 10 years or so, there's kind of been this trend, this push towards doing a primary anastomosis after bowel resection as opposed to a stoma. But, are you the type of conservative surgeon that generally believes that a stoma is the safer course of action? Well, if so, this is an article you may want to know about. This was published in JPS in October of 2022, and it was a group out of Emma Hospital Amsterdam, and what they did was a 20-year retro spective review of patients that had stomas to assess the true morbidity. So what did they find? They found that about 40% of patients had some sort of major morbidity from a stoma, whether in the creation or the takedown of the stoma. For example, about 25% of patients that have a stoma creation will have either a high output stoma or they'll have a prolapse. And about 25% of patients in the stoma takedown will have a stricture, a leak, or a hernia at the stoma site. So these are pretty big numbers. So, what's the conclusion? Think twice that thinking that a stoma is a gimme. It's not.