Emergency Versus Elective Cholecystectomy in Acute Cholecystitis in the Era of Laparoscopy: A Prospective Randomized Comparative Study

Acute cholecystitis is considered one of the most common acute surgical problems. It includes typical symptoms of pain in right hypochondrium, fever, increased leucocytes count and abdominal US used to confirm this clinical diagnosis. Laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is the standard treatment for acute cholecystitis due to the advantages of small wounds, less use of abdominal drains , less need for antibiotics and analgesics and less postoperative hospital stay time.Laparoscopic cholecystectomy in acute cholecystitis may be performed as soon as begging of the symptoms called emergency or urgent laparoscopic cholecystectomy and maybe scheduled in advance after controlling acute attack after 6-8weeks called elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy . Emergency laparoscopic cholecystectomy has advantage of a decreased hospital stay and avoids the risk of emergency admission for non-resolved or recurrent symptoms, which is associated with an increase in morbidity, pain and delayed return to work. Also, some trials showed increased morbidity with elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy mostly due to biliary disease while patients await surgery. Comparative studies are deficient in evaluation of outcomes of emergency cholecystectomy and elective cholecystectomy in acute cholecystitis. So the interest of our study is to compare between the emergency laparoscopic cholecystectomy and elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy regarding the feasibility and the safety of the first.