[To improve the surgical outcome of chronic constipation: from bed to the bench]

The prevalence of chronic constipation is about 16% in adults, and increases with age, especially after 60 years old. Usually, surgical intervention is recommended to patients with long standing intractable constipation, who have undergone various conservative therapies. Lots of surgical procedures have been reported for different kinds of constipation, including slow transit, outlet obstruction, etc. For slow transit constipation, total or subtotal colectomy is commonly used. Merely for the internal rectal prolapse, at least 10 procedures are commonly adopted in clinic. However, no single procedure has been reached a consensus, not to mention the operative indication, principle of procedure selection and outcome assessment. Objectively, the surgical result of chronic constipation is far from perfect. Especially for outlet obstructive constipation, the satisfactory rate is only about 70%. How to enhance the surgical therapeutic effects should be expected on clinical and translation research. Fortunately, sacral neuromodulation therapy and percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation in managing refractory constipation have brought expected outcomes in recent years. Relationship between microbiota of the colonic mucosa and symptoms, and the sensory nerve regulatory mechanism have attracted much attention. We believe that more translational medicine results can be helpful in the future to improve the comprehensive efficacy of constipation.