Prolonged operating room time in emergency general surgery is associated with venous thromboembolic complications

We evaluated the association between operating room time and developing a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) or pulmonary embolus (PE) after emergency general surgery (EGS).

We reviewed six common EGS procedures in the 2013-2015 NSQIP dataset. After tabulating their incidence of postoperative VTE events, we calculated predictors of developing a VTE using adjusted multivariate logistic regressions.

Of 108,954 EGS patients, 1,366 patients (1.3%) developed a VTE postoperatively. The median time to diagnosis was 9 days [5-16] for DVTs and 8 days [5-16] for PEs. Operating room time of 100 min or more was associated with increased risk of developing a DVT (OR 1.30 [1.12-2.21]) and PE (OR:1.25 [1.11-2.43]) with a 7% and 5% respective increase for every 10 min increase after the 100 min. Other independent predictors of VTE complications were older age, and history of cancer, and emergent colectomies on procedure-level analysis.

Prolonged operating room time is independently associated with increased risk of developing VTE complications after an EGS procedure. Most of the VTE complications were delayed in presentation.