There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Laparoscopic adrenalectomy has become the gold standard in most patients with adrenal
tumors. It is unclear; however, at what size an adrenal neoplasm should be resected
by means of an open or a laparoscopic approach. The aim of the present study was to
compare the outcomes of laparoscopic adrenalectomy for large tumors with smaller tumors.
A prospective study of patients who underwent adrenalectomy during the period 2006-2009
was undertaken. The patients were divided into 2 groups according to the tumor size.
Group 1 (n=29) consisted of patients presenting tumors smaller than 5 cm in diameter;
group 2 (n=31) consisted of patients with tumors larger than 5 cm in diameter.
Two of the 29 tumors in group 1 (6.8%) were malignant at final histology. However,
11 of the 31 tumors in group 2 (35.4%) were malignant. There were no significant differences
between operating time and complications of groups 1 and 2. The intra-operative blood
loss was significantly lower in group 1 than in group 2.
Laparoscopic adrenalectomy is a reasonable procedure for selected large adrenal tumors
when a complete resection is technically feasible and there is no evidence of local
invasion.