Abstract
Background: Abdominal plastic surgery is characterized as a surgical trauma, which promotes an inflammation. Preoperative nutrition can minimize postoperative complications and improve surgical outcome. This article aims to review the role of nutrition on inflammation in the patients submitted to abdominal plastic surgery. Material and methods: In the present study, patients were offered two oral nutritional supplements (ONS1) once a day for 7 days in the preoperative period. The ONS1 (negative control) consists of a dairy drink while the ONS2 (positive control) a drink with immunomodulatory nutraceuticals. Each patient ingested 200 ml of supplements (ONS1 or ONS2) mixed with 50 grams of diet ice cream. A number of 25 adult patients submitted to a full abdominoplasty were randomly into the ONS1 and ONS2 groups. Clinical and laboratory evaluations were performed in four moments: 1) on the first presurgical day (T0) and start of supplementation, with patients fasting for 12 hours; 2) on the anesthetic induction of the surgery, i.e., the 8th day (T1), after confirming that the patient has ingested supplementation for seven days. The evaluated parameters were: HSP27, HSP70, IL-1β, IL-6, CRP and TNF-α. Results: There were no statistically significant differences between the experimental groups for all analyzed supplementation times. Conclusion: Therefore, the oral nutritional supplementation using L-alanyl-glutamine, arginine and oil mixtures with both high ω-9:ω-6 ratio and low ω-6:ω-3 ratio and containing ω-3 fatty acids (ALA, EPA and DHA) has no nutraceutical preconditioning effect on the shock proteins and inflammatory mediators of surgical trauma we studied.