Smoking has long been linked with slower recovery in general from injuries and surgeries, and now a new study finds that smokers face more complications and higher chances of death following major surgery for colorectal cancers and other diseases.
"We wanted to see if smoking has a specific effect on these patients... and really wanted to know if patients who stopped smoking had better results," said lead author Dr. Abhiram Sharma, who was at the University of Rochester in New York during the study.
Smoking constricts the flow of blood throughout the body and is thought to prevent oxygen from getting to tissues that are trying to heal, according to the authors.
In September, a review of surgeries to repair knee ligaments found that smokers tended to have worse outcomes, including not being able to get back full knee function. (See Reuters Health article of September 26, 2012
For the new report, published in the Annals of Surgery, Sharma and his colleagues studied patients included in a nationally representative database of U.S. surgeries between 2005 and 2010.
Overall, 47,574 patients were included in the analysis. All had part of their colon or rectum removed, a surgery known as a colorectal resection, either because of cancer, diverticular disease or inflammatory bowel disease.
10/11/2012 : By Andrew M. Seaman / Reuters.
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