Body image is an important augmentation to quality of life in evaluating the results of laparoscopic versus classic surgery

Introduction: Apart from the positive biomedical consequences, there are supposed psychological benefits gained bypatients due to laparoscopy. To evaluate the psychological consequences of surgical intervention areas such as thequality of a patient's life and subjective body image perception are explored.Aim: The purpose was to determine the value of body esteem evaluation in differentiation of the results of laparoscopicvs. classic surgery in the context of insufficient sensitivity of quality of life measures in such differentiation.Material and methods:There were 57 participants treated with laparoscopic and classic cholecystectomies andadrenalectomies in the Department of Surgery, Medical University of Gdansk, Poland. Two types of psychologicalmeasures were used: the Body Esteem Scale (BES) and Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy (FACIT). Bothsurveys were distributed to the patients 1 day before and 1 month after the operation.Results: One month after the intervention, QoL, according to FACIT, increased slightly among patients after bothlaparoscopic and classic surgery (respectively 4.5% and 6.8%, p < 0.005), while the body image indicator decreasedby 2.9% after the laparoscopic operation, compared to 28.5% after classic surgery. Multiple logistic regressionrevealed that high body esteem scale results were significant predictors of the laparoscopic approach (OR 2.15,95% CI 2.01-2.86) while quality of life alone was not a significant differentiator of the approaches used (OR 1.01, 95% CI0.75-1.35).Conclusions: Body image studies provide more sensitive information capable of distinguishing between laparoscopicand classic approaches than merely quality of life measures, which justifies the complementary use of BI in the comparativeassessment of classic and laparoscopic surgery.