Jonah Stulberg, MD, FACS, is stickler about requiring patients to stop smoking at least 3 months before hernia surgery. He even uses urine tests to confirm whether they actually quit. A study by Dr. Stulberg and his colleagues supports this approach: .
The finding held up even after the researchers controlled for various factors. “Our findings are in agreement with other findings in higher risk surgeries, and they provide evidence that low-risk surgeries are not exempt from the risks associated with smoking,” said Dr. Stulberg in an interview. “Our data would suggest that there is significant clinical benefit to encouraging smoking cessation before elective hernia repair.”
Dr. Jonah Stulberg
The researchers launched the study to better understand how smoking affects complication rates in light of the fact that “surgeons in the U.S. tend to offer low-risk elective surgical procedures to patients who are actively smoking despite overwhelming evidence that smoking increases surgical risks,” Dr. Stulberg said.
The researchers tracked 220,629 patients in the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Project (NSQIP) database who underwent several types of elective hernia repair from 2011 to 2014.
Just over 18% of the patients said they’d smoked over the past year; they were more likely to be younger (median age, 50 for smokers vs. 57 for nonsmokers). Smokers also were more likely to be black, to be underweight, and to consume two or more alcoholic beverages per day (P less than .05).
The researchers tracked serious complications in the 30 days after surgery such as death, sepsis, and readmission.