Three-port versus four-port laparoscopic cholecystectomy in acute and chronic cholecystitis

The medical records of 495 patients who underwent LC between September 1999 and September 2003 were reviewed. Variables such as complications, operating time, conversion to open procedure, hospital stay, and analgesia requirements were compared.Two hundred and eighty-three patients underwent three-port LC and 212 patients underwent four-port LC. In total, 163 (32.9%) patients were diagnosed with AC and 332 (67.1%) with CC by histology. There was no statistical difference between the three and four-port groups in terms of complications, conversion to open procedure (p = 0.6), and operating time (p = 0.4). Patients who underwent three-port LC required less opiate analgesia (pethidine) than those who underwent four-port LC (p = 0.0001). The hospital stay was found to be related to the amount of opiates consumed (p = 0.0001) and was significantly shorter in the three-port LC group (p = 0.005).Three-port LC is a safe procedure for AC and CC in expert hands. The procedure offers considerable advantages over the traditional four-port technique in the reduction of analgesia requirements and length of hospital stay.Since its foundation in 1987 by Philip Mouret of Lyon, laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) has been the procedure of choice for symptomatic gall bladder disease [1]. Since then, there have been many changes and improvements in the technique. Traditional LC is performed using four-port technique [2,3]. Reducing the size or number of ports did not affect the safety of the procedure and further enhanced the advantages of laparoscopic over open cholecystectomy [4]. These modifications actually reduced the pain and analgesia requirement [5]. Three trocars and even two trocars were used to perform LC [4,6], as has using mini-instruments, authors of these new techniques claimed that these techniques took a similar time to perform and caused less postoperative pain than the standard laparoscopic cholecystectomy [5,7]. Some authors even advised for procedures as needlescope