Abdominal Hernia

Abdominal hernia

        When talking about hernia, a general definition comes to mind: due to the loosening of your abdominal muscles, some of your organs have a tendency to push right through the muscle ring that holds them inside your abdomen and end up in other cavities of your body, where they cause nothing but trouble.

       Abdominal hernia is a perfect didactic condition, being known as classical hernia. Actually, this kind of hernia was the first one mentioned as a separate disease, it had its symptoms catalogued and its treatment tested and retested over and over again. You might wonder why it is so popular in the scientific and medical world. Well, because abdominal hernia is hard to miss in a patient: it forms a huge, painful bulge that protrudes from the patients' abdomen. The explanation is similar to that of other types of hernia: your abdomen is lined with muscles and different kinds of tissue. Every move you make puts a strain on your muscles. If they are healthy, the damage will remain in normal parameters, being reversible. From the moment that your body stops healing itself, the problems begin. Your abdominal muscles get weaker by the day, with nothing to support them. Finally, they snap (in serious cases) or simply loosen enough to cause hernia. When talking about abdominal hernia, your organs (liver, stomach, intestines, female reproductive organs and bladder) find that little fissure and push through it until they create a bulge, painful and hardened.

       There are, of course, two types of abdominal hernia by its reversibility:

• The reducible version: your bulge, when pressed very lightly, will easily slip back inside your abdomen. This is the less severe case of abdominal hernia.
• The non - reducible version: this is the meaner sibling. In this case, the bulge not only does not move back into the abdomen, but it can completely trap a part of the organ outside its place of origin, making it impossible for that organ to function properly. For example, if a part of your intestine is trapped, your digestive system is going to start misfiring very quickly.

Abdominal hernia pictures

       Abdominal hernia symptoms are pretty obvious and mostly consist of the appearance of a conspicuous bulge that tends to get bigger if you exert yourself, pain around the bulge and, in severe cases, when the organ becomes entrapped, constipation, fever, vomiting. Once your symptoms appear, you must pay a visit to your attending physician.

       There are no safe bets when it comes to hernia. It has no preference for any sex or age. It manifests itself both in newborns and in elders, male or female. However, there are certain things that could cause it, so pay attention:

• Chronic coughing or persistent sneezing: the rhythmic thumping of the cough or the sneeze against your muscles for an undetermined amount of time makes it easy for a hernia to form.
• Obesity: the extra layers of fat push at the muscles of your abdominal wall, keeping them tense all the time. At some point, it gets too much for your muscles to hold in, so the fat breaks right through them, leading to hernia.
• Pregnancy: just like with obesity, the uterus pushes unnaturally against your other organs and muscles, causing a tear and thus, a hernia.
• Straining to lift heavy objects.

Abdominal hernia treatment

       Just like any other kind of hernia, abdominal hernia is fixed only by surgery. It is not a complicated, nor really dangerous procedure, but it is best left to be explained by the surgeons. However, you have to keep in mind that if you leave your hernia untreated for a long period of time, it will evolve from a reducible hernia to a non - reducible one. In the end, it can completely cut off the entrapped organ from the blood supply, causing that organ to die. Be very careful, once this happens, there is no more delaying the surgery: you either do it, or suffer from severe pain and, in some cases, septicemia.

Types of abdominal hernia

       There are several types of abdominal hernia that have been studied and described in medical treatises. As a classification criterion, the easiest to understand is the one referring to the place of the hernia:

• Inguinal hernia: a part of your small bowel passes through the inguinal canal and appears as a bulge on one or both sides of your groin.
• Epigastric hernia: is a result of the weakening of the muscles above your navel.
• Umbilical hernia: the muscles surrounding your bellybutton loosen enough for some of your fatty tissue to press directly on your skin.
• Femoral hernia: it manifests itself between the abdomen and the thigh, appearing as a bulge on the upper thigh.
• Incisional hernia: it appears at the site of an already healed incision.