Perforated diverticulitis after surgery.

The authors report on three patients who had a perforated sigmoid diverticulum after unrelated surgery. If the preceding operation is remote in time from the perforation, detection is relatively easy, but if the perforation occurs shortly after major abdominal surgery, its presentation may be totally masked by the postoperative state. Awareness of this possibility may help alert the clinician to the presence of perforation of a sigmoid diverticulum in unexplained postoperative collapse. Although discovery of these three cases suggests that diverticular perforation is not uncommon after surgery, a causal relationship is not known, and the authors could not find any previous reports of such a relationship.