Identification of risk factors for morbidity and mortality after Hartmann’s reversal surgery – a retrospective study from two French centers

Hartmann’s reversal procedures are often fraught with complications or failure to recover. This being a fact, it is often difficult to select patients with the optimal indications for a reversal. The post-recovery morbidity and mortality rates in the literature are heterogeneous between 0.8 and 44%. The identification of predictive risk factors of failure of such interventions would therefore be very useful to help the practitioner in his approach. Given these elements, it was important to us to analyze the practice of two French university hospitals in order to highlight such risk factors and to allow surgeons to select the best therapeutic strategy. We performed a bicentric observational retrospective study between 2010 and 2015 that studied the characteristics of patients who had undergone Hartmann surgery and were subsequently reestablished. The aim of the study was to identify factors influencing morbidity and postoperative mortality of Hartmann’s reversal. Primary outcome was complications within the first 90 postoperative days. 240 patients were studied of which 60.4% were men. The mean age was 69.48 years. The median time to reversal was 8 months. 79.17% of patients were operated as emergency cases where the indication was a diverticular complication (39.17%). Seventy patients (29.2%) underwent a reversal and approximately 43% of these had complications within the first 90 postoperative days. The mean age of these seventy patients was 61.3 years old and 65.7% were males. None of them benefited from a reversal in the first three months. We identified some risk factors for morbidity such as pre-operative low albuminemia (p = 0.005) and moderate renal impairment (p = 0.019). However, chronic corticosteroid use (p = 0.004), moderate renal insufficiency (p = 0.014) and coronary artery disease (p = 0.014) seem to favour the development of anastomotic fistula, which is itself, a risk factor for mortality (p = 0.007). Our study highlights an important rate of complications including significant anastomotic fistula after Hartmann’s reversal. Precarious nutritional status and cardiovascular comorbidities should clearly lead us to reconsider the surgical indication for continuity restoration.