IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aph/ajpbhl/1987774471-475_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Incidence and costs of incidental appendectomy as a preventive measure

Author

Listed:
  • Sugimoto, T.
  • Edwards, D.

Abstract

Statewide hospital discharge data in South Carolina for the period 1979-81 were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the incidental appendectomy performed as a preventive measure. The occurrence of incidental appendectomy exceeded that of appendicitis treated by appendectomy, with population-based rates of 1.13/1,000 and 0.97/1,000 person-years, respectively. Over 64 per cent of appendicitis cases occurred in persons under 25 years of age while 74 per cent of incidental appendectomies occurred in persons age 25 and over. Extrapolating to the nation, the data suggest that 254,250 incidental appendectomies might prevent 3,382 future cases of hospitalized appendicitis. The cost of the prevented cases is estimated as $6,764,000. The cost of the incidental appendectomies would be $20,340,000 if as many as 10 per cent of surgeons' fees were separately charged and twice as much if twice as many were so charged. Information on charges for incidental appendectomies is not readily available.

Suggested Citation

  • Sugimoto, T. & Edwards, D., 1987. "Incidence and costs of incidental appendectomy as a preventive measure," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 77(4), pages 471-475.
    • Handle: RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:1987:77:4:471-475_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:1987:77:4:471-475_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.apha.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.