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Early oral feeding for patients who undergo lower gastrointestinal and non-GI surgery has become the standard of care, but withholding food for the first several days after upper GI surgery is practiced widely. To investigate whether this protocol is beneficial, Norwegian investigators randomized 447 patients who had undergone upper GI surgery (mostly gastrectomy, pancreaticoduodenectomy, or partial hepatic resection) to early initiation of oral food intake (1 day after surgery) or to enteral-tube feeding for 5 days.
Patients were followed for 8 weeks. Seventy-six tube-fed patients (34%) and 62 oral-fed patients (28%) experienced major complications (e.g., pneumonia, intra-abdominal abscesses, sepsis, anastomotic leaks). No significant diffe…