Conservative and surgical treatment in acute and chronic anal fissure. A study on 308 patients.

The aetiology of anal fissure is not fully understood--why some heal spontaneously and others become chronic remains a mystery. In this study we compared surgical and conservative therapy and investigated which surgical procedure is most useful in the treatment of fissure. There were investigated 308 patients, 157 with acute fissure and 151 with chronic fissure. Healing was achieved in 45 +/- 15 days and in 40 +/- 10 days in acute fissures treated conservatively and surgically, respectively, 40 +/- 15 days and 30 +/- 5 days were required to achieve healing in chronic fissure by conservative and surgical therapy, respectively. Manometric tests showed a decrease in resting pressure and maximum voluntary contraction pressure at one month, and an increase towards the pre-operative level at 4 months for both parameters. There were no recurrences at 5 years in 100 patients (50 males and 50 females).