Laparoscopic femoral hernia repair: our experience: a case series with review of literature

Abstract

Femoral hernia is one of the rare types of groin hernia. Though classical clinical examination findings for its accurate diagnosis are well documented, it very often gets mistaken for the much commoner inguinal hernia. Traditionally, it has been surgically repaired by open approach. However, the advent of laparoscopy has brought femoral hernia repair under its purview. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the incidence of femoral hernia in our series and outcomes of its laparoscopic repair. We retrospectively evaluated the prospectively collected data of all the 796 patients who had undergone laparoscopic repair for groin hernias, performed by a single surgeon at our institution, over 15 years (from 2007 to 2022). There were 7 patients of femoral hernia in our series. All were diagnosed ‘on table’, while operating purportedly for inguinal hernia. Three out of these seven patients had occult femoral hernia. Femoral hernia is a rare entity and is often not accurately diagnosed pre-operatively. Its laparoscopic management is feasible, effective, and safe.