The role of elective surgery: Which patients should be selected?

Abstract

Although the incidence of acute diverticulitis (AD) has risen over the past few decades, particularly in younger patients, the rate of emergency surgery has been dropping due to a major paradigm shift toward more conservative management approaches. The long-term management strategy after successful nonoperative treatment of AD remains unclear, and indications for elective resection are a matter of ongoing debate. Most modern professional guidelines advise considering elective surgery in an individualized approach, particularly after recovery of acute complicated diverticulitis (ACD) with abscess and in patients with recurrence, persisting symptoms, and complications such as abscess, fistula, and stenosis, focusing on the patient’s quality of life, where recurrence, severity, and symptoms are major determinants. However, guidelines are still not clearly standardized for appropriate decision-making, with patients being managed very differently from institution to institution, and surgeon to surgeon, mainly due to a lack of risk stratification for recurrence and severity that have been the scope of numerous studies but still need to be clarified. In this chapter, we explore the current surgical indications for AD, considering this disease’s ongoing prognostic factors, for proper decision-making.