Surgical staple

Surgical staples are specialized staples used in surgery in place of sutures to close skin wounds, connect or remove parts of the bowels or lungs. The use of staples over sutures reduces the local inflammatory response, width of the wound, and the time it takes to close. Surgical staples are specialized staples used in surgery in place of sutures to close skin wounds, connect or remove parts of the bowels or lungs. The use of staples over sutures reduces the local inflammatory response, width of the wound, and the time it takes to close. A more recent development, from the 1990s, uses clips instead of staples for some applications; this does not require the staple to penetrate. The technique was pioneered by 'father of surgical stapling', Hungarian surgeon Hümér Hültl. Hultl's prototype stapler of 1908 weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), and required two hours to assemble and load. The technology was refined in the 1950s in the Soviet Union, allowing for the first commercially produced re-usable stapling devices for creation of bowel and vascular anastomoses. Mark M. Ravitch brought a sample of stapling device after attending a surgical conference in USSR, and introduced it to entrepreneur Leon C. Hirsch, who founded the United States Surgical Corporation in 1964 to manufacture surgical staplers under its Auto Suture brand. Until the late 1970s USSC had the market essentially to itself, but in 1977 Johnson & Johnson's Ethicon brand entered the market and today both are widely used, along with competitors from the Far East. USSC was bought by Tyco Healthcare in 1998, which became Covidien on June 29, 2007. Safety and patency of mechanical (stapled) bowel anastomoses has been widely studied. It is generally the case in such studies that sutured anastomoses are either comparable or less prone to leakage. It is possible that this is the result of recent advances in suture technology, along with increasingly risk-conscious surgical practice. Certainly modern synthetic sutures are more predictable and less prone to infection than catgut, silk and linen, which were the main suture materials used up to the 1990s. One key feature of intestinal staplers is that the edges of the stapler act as a haemostat, compressing the edges of the wound and closing blood vessels during the stapling process. Recent studies have shown that with current suturing techniques there is no significant difference in outcome between hand sutured and mechanical anastomoses (including clips), but mechanical anastomoses are significantly quicker to perform. In patients that are subjected to pulmonary resections where lung tissue is sealed with staplers, there is often postoperative air leaks. Alternative techniques to seal lung tissue are currently investigated. The first commercial staplers were made of stainless steel with titanium staples loaded into reloadable staple cartridges.