FEBRUARY 13, 2019

Failure of Antibiotic Therapy for Appendicitis May Be Underestimated

San Diego—One in seven patients in the United States who underwent nonoperative management for acute appendicitis were readmitted to a different hospital within a year for the same diagnosis—a pattern that suggests many studies underestimate the rate of failure of nonoperative management for appendicitis, according to a study presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma.

Of the patients who initially received nonoperative management and