Reducing the Pain of Your Child’s Appendicitis

It’s estimated that one in 20 people will get appendicitis. Although it can strike at any age, it’s most common between the ages of 10 and 30, with more than 650,000 appendectomies performed on children each year. It is the most common pediatric abdominal emergency.

At OSF HealthCare Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria, upwards of 100 appendectomies are performed each year. The surgeons focus on making the procedure as minimally invasive as possible. That includes doing CT scans for diagnosis only when necessary with the lowest dose of radiation possible. The goal is to get children who need an appendectomy in and out of the hospital as quickly as possible.

"In the last six years we've done a lot of single incision laparoscopy where we can make a small incision the belly button, use laparoscopic equipment and the hope is we can get their appendix out and in six months from then they never know they had surgery."

Pediatric surgeon Dr. Charles Aprahamian is one of more than 140 specialists at OSF Children’s Hospital of Illinois who has done extra training exclusively focusing on children and their families. Everyone from anesthesiology to post-operative care to Child Life specialists is focused on children, collaborating with organizations across the country to provide the highest quality care.

Dr. Aprahamian says people take their automobiles to mechanics who specialize in a particular brand and model and it should be no different for parents when it comes to their child, because kids aren’t just little adults.
 

"Children have different physiology, different disease processes, and there's a long-term risk associated with everything that we do in children. So we take those into account with anything that we do whether it's a medicine, a procedure and certainly the traumas we take care of here at the Children's Hospital, it's unique."

Learn about the range of surgical services and more offered at OSF Children’s Hospital of Illinois.