Therapeutic Laparoscopic Surgical Procedures in Children

Between January 1994 and December 1995.29 pa-tients were treated with laparoscopic surgery in our department. The aim of this study is to present our ex-perience with the indications and efficacy of la-paroscopic surgery in pediatric surgery. The age of the patients was heteen one and 16 years. The most common procedure that we per-formed was appendectomy (13 patients). The other-common procedures were ovarian cyst drainage (four patients), hemostasis in traumatic int-raabdominal hemorrhage (three patients). sple-nectomy (four patients). Swenson's procedure (three patients), and cholecystectomy (three patients). We had to converse to open surgery for technical reasons in a total of four patients (10%). We observed extra peritoneal insujilation in ma patients, transient tachycardia and arrhythmia in five patients. and tran-sient hyperthermia in another two patients as int-raoperative complications. One patient developed postoperative ileus after appendectomy. The duration of the laparoscopic procedures was longer than that of the open surgery in spknectomy and Swenson's procedure. similar in apendectomy, but shorter in cholecystectomy, ovarian cyst dra-inage, and hemostasis for intraandominal he-morrhage. Hospital stays were shorter in all la-paroscopic procedures comparing with open surgery. Laparoscopic surgerey is a useful method with low incidence of complications which are well to-lerated for the treatment of the surgical pediatric pa-tients.