Hello and welcome to AbClo’s official blog on related to the open abdomen!

We understand the burden open abdomen surgery places on patients, families, surgeons and hospital systems. We hope to use this blog to help share informative literature and general information on how to deal with open abdomen complications, reduce risk in laparotomy surgeries, and increase post-surgical wound care for optimal patient outcomes and experience.

Why Are Abdomens Kept Open Post-Surgery?

So what are open abdomens and are they required in surgical care? An open abdomen occurs following a laparotomy incision that is not closed in the index surgery. The decision to not close a patient after abdominal surgery can arise from physiological, anatomical, or logistical reasons. Simply put, if the patient cannot be physically closed due to loss of skin or abdominal domain, or they shouldn’t be closed due to infection or re-operation necessity/risk, they won’t be. But why are intentionally left open abdomens a bad thing?

The Various Complications Associated With Open Abdomens

This answer can be found in the complication risks associated with open abdomens. There is a simple yet direct correlation found between the number of hours abdomens are left open and an increase in complication rate. This arises from various factors like infection risk, fistula formation, and most importantly, fascial dehiscence. In the same process as a thumb stiffening up after a cut, your abdominal wall muscles naturally harden and laterally retract to the side of your torso in a process called fascial dehiscence. This, coupled with a process of lateral buckling within the rectus abdominus muscles, creates a ridged abdominal wall resistant to being closed.

Currently there are very few ways to prevent lateral retraction fascial dehiscence (hint: it’s only AbClo), yet there are various approaches to recovering lateralized abdominal walls, all of which are no fun. There are two main thought processes behind recovering lateralized abdominal walls, one being a stitched-in fabric to both sides of the incision that is slowly ‘rung’ together, pulling the wall with it, and the second being suturing techniques that hook into the wall adjacent to both incisional sides and pull them together like shoelaces. Both approaches are highly invasive, require operating room visits, extend ICU stays, and cause cosmetic and physiological problems within the abdominal wall.

So you may be asking… how can we mitigate reactive measures to open abdomen management? By using preventative measures! Emergency damage control laparotomies and open approaches in acute general surgery are valuable and life-saving procedures. Luckily, laparoscopy is moving to replace some of these use cases, reducing the need for open approaches, but we are still a long way away from stopping open laparotomies and abdominal surgeries. Instead of attempting to solve problems as they arise with these high-risk patients, there needs to be a paradigm shift in how we approach open abdomen management in the first place. This is exactly why AbClo was created.

Revolutionizing Open Abdomen Closure & Management

AbClo is the newest and best approach to open abdomen management. It functions via circumferential pressure around the abdomen to apply non-invasive tractional force, pushing the wound edges back together. Its preventative design affords a gold-standard closure rate, even in the toughest of patients, and helps prevent planned ventral hernias, the worst outcome of open abdomens that costs the US Healthcare System 10 billion dollars yearly.

In our next post, we will revisit AbClo, how it prevents negative outcomes, and why the preventative approach is the best. Click here to read on.

Interested in learning more about the AbClo? Click here.