Chih-Yuan Fu, Francesco Bajani, Caroline Butler, Stanley Welsh, Thomas Messer, Matthew Kaminsky, Frederick Starr, Andrew Dennis, Victoria Schlanser, Justin Mis, Stathis Poulakidas, Faran Bokhari
BACKGROUND: Morbid obesity is usually accompanied by both subcutaneous and visceral fat accumulation. Fat can mimic an air bag, absorbing the force of a collision. We hypothesized that morbid obesity is mechanically protective for hollow viscus organs in blunt abdominal trauma (BAT). METHODS: The National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) was queried for BAT patients from 2013 to 2015. We looked at the rate of gastrointestinal (GI) tract injuries in all BAT patients with different BMIs...
November 26, 2018: World Journal of Surgery