Optimized Drainage of Pancreatic-Digestive Anastomosis in Patients with Pancreatoduodenal Resection

Summary The study compared early post-surgical complications between two groups of patients with pancreatoduodenal resection for pancreatic head carcinoma: patients with pancreatic-gastric anastomosis with mixed drainage and controls with pancreatic jejunal anastomosis with external drainage. The present study was a cohort study. The patient group was selected prospectively, and the control group – retrospectively. Patients were randomized by sex, age, primary tumor location, pancreatic parenchyma density, clinical symptoms, tumor–node–metastasis (TNM), and grade (G). We used the IBM SPSS Statistics software with the following tests: Fisher’s exact test, Pearson’s chi-squared test, Mann–Whitney U test. The optimized reconstruction approach with mixed drainage reduced early complications: early mortality - by 2.5%, overall morbidity - by 7.5%; pancreatic-digestive anastomosis insufficiency - by 2.5%; intra-abdominal bleeding - by 2.5%; intra-abdominal infection - by 2.5%; gastroparesis - by 5.0%; wound infection - by 2.5%; biliary leakage -by 2.5%. There were no cases of clinically significant pancreatic fistula. The control group was associated with an average of 9-fold higher relative risk of early complications. The passage was restored between the 4th and 7th day. Patients had a shorter average hospital stay (11 days) compared to controls (22 days). Digestive anastomoses reconstruction on a single loop and mixed intraluminal drainage through a modified nasogastric tube led to a 7-fold reduction in early post-surgical complications and a 2-fold shorter hospital stay.