What is a Hernia

Male1: Doctor Slasvelt, what is a hernia?
Male2: A hernia is any time there is an unnatural hole in a layer of muscle anywhere in your body. Now there are some kinds of hernias that occur commonly in children. You may have heard of an umbilical hernia. That is a hernia, an opening in the umbilicus, the belly button. You may have heard of an inguinal hernia. That is a hernia in the groin that can occur in boys or girls. It is more common in boys and it is a hernia that is slightly more dangerous. We actually have to fix inguinal hernias. Umbilical hernias do not need to be repaired. The vast majority of umbilical hernias will close by themselves by the time the kid is four or five years old. So what we do is if a parent comes to us with a child with umbilical hernia, we look at it. If it is not very, very large, or if there is no breakdown of the skin over the umbilical hernia, if the baby is not having any pain or discomfort from the umbilical hernia, we will tell them to go home and just watch it. They say that 80% close by age five and in other 10% or so, close over the subsequent five years, so we usually refuse to close umbilical hernias until the kids are four or five years old. If it is still quite large, then if they are still symptomatic, then sometimes, we will go ahead and do the surgery. Surgery for an umbilical hernia is actually quite simple because all we are doing is making a little incision just below the hernia itself, going to the muscle layer where there is an opening and sawing the opening closed so that nothing can come through. But umbilical hernias are generally not very dangerous and because we know that the vast majority close, in general, we do not fix them in little babies.


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