Preoperative progressive pneumoperitoneum: The answer for treating giant inguinal hernias while avoiding morbidities?

Preoperative progressive pneumoperitoneum (PPP) is mostly used for giant abdominal incisional hernias, and only a few isolated or paired cases that used PPP in the treatment of giant inguinal hernias (GIH) have been reported. The main objective of this study is to describe our technique in the use of PPP in the treatment of GIH in a series of patients who presented with this challenging condition.

We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of a series of patients treated with PPP for GIH during a 6-year period (2012-2018) at a single institution. The demographics, preoperative, and surgical characteristics were analyzed.

In total, 7 patients were treated for GIH with PPP. The median age was 64 (range 30-89) years. The median history time with the inguinal hernia was 8 (range 2-20) years. The median time of PPP was 22 (range 15-30) days. All patients underwent the Lichtenstein technique. The median follow-up time was 12 (range 3-84) months. Three (42.8%) of the patients had preoperative complications. Two patients developed mild dyspnea during PPP, and another patient had subcutaneous emphysema during the insertion of the catheter. Two (28.5%) patients had postoperative complications. One of them developed a right scrotal abscess, and another patient developed bilateral grade III hydrocele.

With our limited experience, it is too early to tell if this should be the gold standard for the treatment of GIH. To see if there is superiority among different procedures, more studies that compare the morbidity of PPP with that of other trans operative techniques are needed. Nevertheless, the procedure we propose has provided satisfactory results.