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An inguinal hernia is a hernia that occurs in the groin region that can either be on the right side or the left side and is the most common type of hernia that we see.
An inguinal hernia is a hernia that occurs in the groin region that can either be on the right side or the left side and is the most common type of hernia that we see.
A ventral hernia is any hernia that occurs in the abdominal wall, which we call the ventral side of a person. A femoral hernia is a variation of the inguinal or the groin hernia. It occurs right next to the blood vessels that are exiting your abdominal cavity and going into your legs. This would be the femoral artery and vein, and you can develop a bulge right next to it. It's something that we don't see very commonly in men, but we see it more commonly in women.
An incarcerated hernia is a hernia that has allowed the contents within the abdominal cavity to bulge out and actually get stuck in that hole. That can either contain fat or it can contain your intestine. When that occurs, it's a quite concerning condition and generally requires immediate surgery to fix. The one thing that we worry about the most with hernias is for the patient to develop an incarceration. By that I mean having their intestine come out through the hole and becoming stuck in that hole and becoming incarcerated. What that does is that it tends to kink off the intestines so that nothing can flow in and out. Worse than that is that the blood flow to the small intestine can also be compromised and if it's not treated within the first 4-6 hours of first becoming noticed, that piece of intestine can actually die and results in much more serious complications.
Although less common, inguinal hernias can occur in infants or young children. It is treated in the same fashion as in adults in that it requires an operation to repair, although typically we don't use mesh in the adolescent population. If your child does develop a hernia or is born with a hernia, it's not anything that you should be alarmed about. It can be treated easily and after the child recovers, they should have no other consequences from that.
A hiatal hernia is quite different from all of the other abdominal wall hernias in that it involves a loose area or a weakness of the diaphragm, which allows the stomach to actually bulge up into the chest. So that's a completely different entity from all of the other abdominal wall hernias that we typically think about.
An epigastric hernia is another type of ventral hernia and is just specifying the location of the hernia. The epigastric region is in the upper abdomen, so any hernia that occurs in the upper abdomen is something that we would call an epigastric hernia.
Sports hernias are an interesting finding. There isn't actually a great definition for a sports hernia but generally speaking, when an athlete develops pain (and the classic example is a hockey player who strains their leg or their groin - they develop pain, a sharp pain that occurs in their groin) and when you run all these tests, you often can't find anything that's wrong. You can't feel a hernia. When you do an MRI or an ultrasound, you don't see a hernia. But in fact, they continue to have pain. Oftentimes what you find is that the insertion of the muscle that is onto the bone has become torn and that's what's causing the pain. That is often what we consider a sports hernia, which is different from a traditional hernia.
An umbilical hernia is a weakness that develops in the middle of the belly button (which we call the umbilicus) and typically what you see as a bulge coming out from the belly button. People often like to call this an "outie", but an outie really is an umbilical hernia.
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