Patients should be warned that cholecystectomy fails to resolve abdominal pain in more than one-third of those who have the procedure, say the authors of a Dutch clinical trial.

The study of nearly 1070 adults with symptomatic gallstones shows that one year after the procedure, 37% of those who have a cholecystectomy still experience the same abdominal pain they were treated for.

Despite elective cholecystectomy being a common general surgical procedure, there is no consensus on which patients should have the surgery, with the decision largely coming down to surgeon and patient preference, the authors write in the Lancet.

The SECURE trial, carried out across 24 hospitals, aimed to investigate whether more restrictive criteria for cholecystectomy increased the likelihood of patients who underwent the procedure being pain-free afterwards.