On Postcholecystectomy Syndrome

Abstract

10% to 20% of patients who accepted cholecystectomy would have the symptoms such as recurrent upper abdomen or right upper quadrant pains, dyspepsia, or abdominal distension after the meal, or even infection of biliary tract and obstruction of biliary tract and so on several months, or years after the surgery[1,2]. The disease is clinically referred to as “postcholecystectomy syndromeâ€, and it refers to a group of diseases caused by a series of
physiological and pathophysiological changes in human body after the gall bladder is excised. With the development of medical science and the deepened understanding of biliary tract diseases, some independent diseases that cause postcholecystectomy syndrome are identified and they are diagnosed and treated appropriately. Therefore, some scholars at home and abroad suggested that this ambiguous and vague diagnostic name should be abandoned; however,
because the syndrome still contains a lot of diseases with unknown etiology, the term is still of clinical significance and it can’t be abandoned. However, this means that, when we treat this kind of patients, we need to thoroughly investigate his medical history, and try to find out the specific etiological factor through modern imageological examinations and provide reasonable treatments to the patients. Clinically, the postcholecystectomy syndrome can be divided into two parts of diseases, that is, those outside biliary system and those inside biliary system.