Very few (only 5.1%) indicated that a shorter hospital stay was not important, with 64.8% indicating that it was quite or extremely important. There was a weak, negative inhibitor Nintedanib association with age using the Spearman correlation (rho = ?.109, P = 0.049), but this was no longer significant when using the categorical data (P = 0.537). Sex, BMI, and presence of scars also had little association with the importance of shorter in-hospital recovery time. 4. Discussion Here, we captured the opinions of 335 North American patients to obtain their views on this developing technique. Several patient surveys have attempted to characterize those who would be most interested in this new method. Studies published to date have variable results, perhaps related to the population surveyed and questions asked.
Some surveys have shown that patients prefer NOTES to laparoscopic surgery due to its improved cosmetic result with the potential for decreased pain also holding appeal in some studies [7�C10]. However, patients consistently had decreased interest as the potential rate of complication increased [7, 9]. Single port surgery (SPS) is a minimally invasive form of laparoscopic surgery and a large-scale British study (n = 750) comparing patient views on it and NOTES showed that SPS was significantly preferred over open surgery and NOTES [11]. Although experts often point to women as being a target group who would be interested in NOTES [12], studies looking at the effect of gender on opinions of NOTES have led to conflicting results. Varadarajulu et al.
did not find a significant preference by women for NOTES compared to men [9]. Further to this, surveys targeted at women in the context of transvaginal NOTES have had variable results. Sixty-eight percent of women were interested in NOTES in a study by Peterson et al. [8]. However, in an Australian study, three quarters of surveyed women were neutral or unhappy about transvaginal NOTES compared with standard laparoscopic surgery [13]. In keeping with the results of previous surveys, women were significantly more concerned with the cosmetic results of surgery and were more bothered by current scars. NOTES, being a ��scarless�� method, would allay this concern. In addition, female patients are anatomically more versatile candidates for NOTES, with the potential for a transvaginal approach.
Our study did support the theory that women would be more interested in NOTES than men, but this association was lost when additional risk was factored into the equation. Those under 50 years of age rated a scarless method as being more important and expressed more GSK-3 interest, even in the face of increased risk. Although there was a high interest in the concept of NOTES (83% showed at least slight interest), this dropped to 38% when an increased complication risk was proposed compared to traditional techniques.