St. Louis — A new study says that breast-cancer patients who undergo post-mastectomy reconstructive surgery are twice as likely to suffer an infection at the surgery site if they receive an implant instead of their own tissue, reports HealthDay News.
Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis analyzed 949 hospital admissions for mastectomy or breast reconstruction surgery at a university-affiliated hospital between 1999 and 2002. They found that surgical-site infections occurred in 50 women within a year of surgery. These infections appeared in slightly more than 12 percent of mastectomies where breast reconstruction involved an implant, compared with about 6 percent of mastectomies where the reconstruction involved the patient’s own abdominal tissue.
The study also found that the average time between surgery and infection diagnosis was about 47 days and that patients with surgical-site infections had significantly higher hospital costs — an average of about $4,100 per patient — and a significantly longer total length of hospital stay.
The study was reported in the January 2008 issue of the Archives of Surgery.
