Purpose: Inguinal hernia repair remains one of the most common elective general surgical procedures. Previous studies have suggested high rates of chronic pain afterwards. The aim of this study was to evaluate changes in quality of life after local anaesthetic (LA) inguinal hernia surgery performed in a primary care setting.
Methods: Quality of life (QoL) was measured in all patients both pre-operatively and at 6-months post-operatively using the European Hernia Society Scoring tool. Data was analysed by tertile grouping according to initial symptom score.
Results: 497 patients filled out pre-operative QoL forms between June 2020 and May 2022. Post-operative QoL scores were received from 179 patients (164 male (91.6%)). Median pre-operative score was 33 (IQR 20-48). Median post-operative score was 4 (IQR 1-11). Mean improvement in QoL score was 27.8. Nine patients had a worse score at 6-months compared to pre-op (5%). When the data was analysed by pre-op QoL group as expected the low symptom group (score 0-10) had minimal improvement in QoL (0.23) and 5 out of 13 patients (38%) had a worse score. The medium group (score 11-40) had a mean improvement in QoL of 17.25 with 3 out of 92 (3.2%) experiencing a worse score. The high symptom group (score 41-90) had a mean improvement in QoL of 45.4 with only 1 of 76 (1.3%) experiencing a worse score.
Conclusions: LA Inguinal hernia repair improves QoL substantially 6-months after surgery. However, in those patients with low pre-operative scores (< 11) the gain is minimal and rates of chronic symptoms following surgery are very high. We recommend avoiding surgery in this group and instead adopting a surveillance approach.
Keywords: Hernia repair; Inguinal hernia; Local Anaesthetic; Quality of life.
© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature.