Background

With the adoption of Enhanced Recovery After Bariatric Surgery (ERABS) protocols, there is an increasing impetus to identify possible preoperative factors leading to differences in postoperative outcomes and barriers to timely discharge. The prevalence of patients on psychiatric medications undergoing sleeve gastrectomy and their postoperative surgical outcomes are currently unclear.

Methods

Patients who underwent elective minimally invasive sleeve gastrectomy at a high-volume bariatric program in a community hospital from 2018-2020 were retrospectively entered into an Institutional Bariatric Database. Patients were classified based on their preoperative use of psychiatric medications and their postoperative outcomes were analyzed. A p-value less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results

Four hundred and fifty-two patients were analyzed, of which 25% of patients had a preoperative history of use of psychiatric medications. Patients with history of use of psychiatric medications did have a higher however, not significantly increased risk of postoperative nausea (66% vs 59%, p=0.22), no difference in incidence of postoperative emesis (17%), similar length of stay (37 hrs vs 40 hrs) and postoperative complication rate (6% in each group). 30-day readmission rate was noted to be 4%, however, not statistically significant from the 2% in patients not on psychiatric medications (Table1.)

Conclusions

One-fourth of the patients undergoing elective minimally invasive sleeve gastrectomy were found to have psychiatric conditions requiring prescribed medications. There were no significant differences in outcomes within this cohort of patients from the rest of the study population.