It Turns Out Stapler Choice Matters in Lung Cancer Surgery

Video-assisted lobectomies performed with powered staplers resulted in nearly half as many patient bleeding complications as those conducted with manual staplers, according to a recent study. Patients treated with powered staplers were released from the hospital one day earlier than those whose surgeons used manual staplers. The retrospective study, funded by powered-stapler maker Ethicon, also indicated shortened hospital stays and 10% lower costs among the patients treated with the powered devices, most of which were manufactured by Ethicon, part of Johnson & Johnson. Most of the manual devices were made by Medtronic, according to the study, which appears in the journal Advances in Therapy. A lobectomy is a surgical procedure in which an entire lobe of the lung is removed due to cancer, infection, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or benign tumors. Between 2% and 10% percent of lobectomies result in bleeding complications, according to a previous study of video-assisted thoracic surgery and robotic lobectomy published in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery in 2014, and an Ethicon analysis of nearly 27,000 lobectomies captured in the Premier Perspective database for the period of 2008-2014. Most of the patients included in the study were operated on using Ethicon’s Echelon Flex powered staplers. Their rate of bleeding complications was 8.5% compared with manual stapler patients, at 16%. Hospital stays averaged 4.9 days for the powered-stapler group versus 5.9 days for t...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: R & D Source Type: news