Tadeusz M. Wróblewski
Katedra i Klinika Chirurgii Ogólnej, Transplantacyjnej i Wątroby, Warszawski Uniwersytet Medyczny

In recent years, laparoscopic abdominal hernia repair has become an accepted surgical method. So far numerous randomized trials prove this method of treatment to be more effective than the transabdominal, open-access method, especially for small and middle-sized hernias [1-5].

Bariatric re-operations are technically demanding. Although mortality rates are as low as 0.02-1%, the re-operation rate, especially after vertical banded gastroplasty (VBG), is as high as 56% in some series [1-3].

The beginning of what is known today as the “banded gastric bypass” operation can be found in the 1980s. After failed vertical banded gastroplasty (VBG), patients were scheduled to receive a gastric bypass as a revisionary operation. When the VBG was intact, e.g. no rupture of the vertical stapler line was seen, the gastrojejunostomy was created distal to the silastic ring or mesh band, without removing the implant [1].

The number of patients with incisional, umbilical or linea alba hernias is about 13000 per year in Poland [1]. These are potential patients for laparoscopic procedures. Laparoscopic intraperitoneal only mesh (IPOM) hernia repair is becoming widely performed in ventral hernias [2], offering a shorter postoperative hospital stay and lower complication rate in most of the studies [2-4] in comparison to open primary sutured repair and open prosthetic mesh repair. However, late complication rates are not well characterized.

Mid-urethral polypropylene slings have become a standard treatment of stress urinary incontinence (SUI) in women for the last two decades. Retropubic tension-free vaginal tape (TVT) is the most common anti-incontinence procedure and over one million TVT slings have been placed worldwide since 1996.