What Is Hernia
What is Hernia ?
A hernia is an abnormal protrusion of abdominal contents through a defect in the abdominal muscle wall. In other words, this means that the intestines that are normally located within the abdomen tend to protrude out through any muscular defects in the abdominal wall.
What are the causes of a hernia?
A hernia is caused because of weakness or poor tone of abdominal wall muscles.
There may be multiple underlying reasons for muscle weakness, including chronic cough or asthma, constipation, straining excessively during urination, obesity, lifting heavy weights, smoking, and many more.
What are the symptoms of a hernia?
Patients often notice a swelling on the abdominal wall that increases on standing or coughing, and reduces on lying down.
If the hernia continues to progress, the swelling may become prominent at all times, and the defect continues to grow in size.
In an emergency situation, there maybe obstruction of the intestines within the hernial sac. This is associated with pain, vomiting and constipation, and requires urgent hospitalization and surgery.
How is a hernia treated?
A hernia has to be treated by surgery. There are no medications available which can help with a hernia.
How is the surgery performed?
The surgery can be performed laparoscopically, robotically, or rarely by the conventional open method. Minimally invasive techniques involve making 3-4 small cuts on the abdomen, and the open method involves making 1 large cut on top of the hernia swelling. In majority of the cases, a synthetic mesh has to be placed over the defect, so that it gains strength and prevents the formation of another hernia.
Patients recover quite quickly with any of these techniques, and can be discharged the day after the surgery.
Large abdominal wall incisional hernias can be treated very well with robotic surgery as well and show very rapid recovery and early discharge with minimal pain after the surgery.