Fix it while you can … Mortality after umbilical hernia repair in cirrhotic patients

Background: We hypothesize that patients with compensated cirrhosis undergoing elective UHR have an improved mortality compared to those undergoing emergent UHR.

Method: The NIS was queried for patients undergoing UHR by CPT code, and ICD-10 codes were used to define separate patient categories of non-cirrhosis (NC), compensated cirrhosis (CC) and decompensated cirrhosis (DC).

Results: A total of 32,526 patients underwent UHR, 97% no cirrhosis, 1.1% compensated cirrhosis, 1.7% decompensated cirrhosis. On logistic regression, cirrhosis was found to be independently associated with mortality (OR 2.841, CI 2.14-3.77). On subset analysis of only cirrhosis patients, elective repair was found to be protective from mortality (OR 0.361, CI 0.15-0.87, p = 0.02).

Conclusions: In this retrospective review, cirrhosis as well as emergent UHR in cirrhotic patients were independently associated with mortality. More specifically, electively (rather than emergently) repairing an umbilical hernia in cirrhotic patients was independently associated with a 64% reduction in mortality.