Less and less adhesions
The coronavirus has had a major impact on regular healthcare. Fortunately, medical progress has not stood still and there are many new developments. What new treatments are medical specialists looking forward to in 2021?
Less and less adhesions. Richard ten Broek is looking forward to that. He is a trainee abdominal surgeon and junior principle investigator at Radboudumc in Nijmegen.
Abdominal surgery often leaves a visible scar on the abdomen. Less known is that scars also remain on the inside. The main difference between the two is that the scar on the outside is two-dimensional; internal scar tissue is three-dimensional. Sometimes organs grow together as a result. These types of scars are called adhesions. Doctors are becoming more and more aware of it.
Chronic abdominal pain
“You don’t always suffer from adhesions,” says Ten Broek, “but some patients are left with chronic abdominal pain. It also happens that scar tissue gets in the way during a later operation in the abdomen. In women, there is a chance that they will become infertile because the scar tissue blocks the path between the fallopian tube and ovary. It becomes more dangerous with a so-called sterileus. The intestine is closed and the faeces can no longer escape.”
CineMRI scan
With the help of a so-called CineMRI scan, the extent of the adhesions can now be clearly visualized. “For people with pain complaints due to adhesions, surgery to loosen them can offer a solution, but one problem is that adhesions have a tendency to grow back. This can be prevented by adding a biodegradable substance at the end of an operation that keeps different wounds separate from each other, so that they do not grow together,” says Ten Broek.
Nevertheless, one in five patients does not benefit from this. There, adhesions grow together again. “We are now also looking for better solutions at a molecular level, on the one hand to treat pain complaints in a more targeted way, and on the other to better slow down the recurrence of adhesions.”
Thanks to keyhole surgery, the number of adhesions has been reduced by about 30 percent in the past twenty years, but still one in three patients comes back because of problems. Ten Broek: “Fortunately, nowadays more and more attention is being paid to adhesions and the quality of life after operations.”
This article previously appeared in Plus Magazine January 2021. Want to subscribe to the magazine? You can do that in an instant!
