JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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To assess the short-term outcomes of incidental appendectomy through analysis of hospital administrative data and determine the consistency and plausibility of the observed results. ⋯ These findings suggest that incidental appendectomy is associated with a small but definite increase in adverse postoperative outcomes. However, plausible and consistent findings were only obtained after restricting the analysis to low-risk subgroups in which unmeasured differences in patients' baseline characteristics were less likely to confound adjusted outcome comparisons. This exercise highlights the potential pitfalls in nonrandomized outcomes comparisons using data sources with limited clinical detail, such as hospital discharge abstracts.