Short-term outcomes of eTEP repair of ventral hernia in university hospital of Nepal

BACKGROUND: Ventral hernia (primary and incisional) is one of the most frequently encountered problems by the General Surgeon. The enhanced view totally extraperitoneal (eTEP) technique for inguinal hernia was first described by J Daes, which was later used in ventral hernia repair for the first time by Belyansky et al. We applied the same technique for ventral hernia repair to see its feasibility in the context of our country. MATERIALS AND METHODS: It is a single-center prospective observational study of a patient who underwent eTEP (with or without TAR) by a single surgeon between September 2019 and May 2020 and followed up for 12 months. Patient demographics, hernia characteristics, operative details, perioperative complications, and satisfaction scores using the Likert scale were collected for data analysis. RESULTS: The study included 42 patients with 66% of female among them. The mean age was 51 ± 12.97 years, the mean BMI was 29.88 ± 2.16 kg/m2, and the mean ASA of patients was 1.5. Incisional hernia (74%) was the most common diagnosis. The mean operative time was less for the primary hernia (125.45 min) than for the incisional hernia (138.35 min). Intraoperative complications were seen in three (7%) of all the patients. Postoperative length of hospital stay was 1.8 days on average. Postoperative pain was low with only one of the patients having chronic pain while none had a recurrence on follow-up. All the patients were satisfied. CONCLUSION: eTEP is a feasible, cheap, and safe alternative MIS option as it has less morbidity and does not carry an extra cost of mesh in comparison to conventional procedures.