Multicenter Cohort of 768 High-risk Patients With Symptomatic Gallstones, Adding Cholecystectomy Did Not Increase Length of Stay or Perioperative Morbidity, Supporting it as a Safe Single-stage Option

Despite numerous single-center reports and meta-analyses, few studies have directly compared outcomes of LSG with versus without concomitant cholecystectomy exclusively in a high-risk cohort as defined above. To the best of our knowledge, only one prior study (Dincer and Dogan, 2019) specifically examined this high-risk population, and it included only 27 patients in the concomitant group. This multicenter retrospective comparative study - conducted in three research institutes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia - aims to evaluate the safety of concomitant cholecystectomy during LSG in high-risk patients with severe obesity and symptomatic cholelithiasis, using a control group of high-risk patients who underwent LSG alone. Our study provides the largest cohort to date specifically addressing this question in a high-risk population.