Chewing gum promotes bowel function recovery in elderly patients after lumbar spinal surgery: a retrospective single-center cohort study

Background: Postoperative paralytic ileus is not a rare complication after lumbar spinal surgery especially in elderly patients. Chewing is a kind of sham feeding that has been reported to stimulate bowel motility, but so far there was no study showed these positive results may or may not be extrapolated to the spinal surgery population. We sought to determine whether chewing gum facilitates bowel function recovery in elderly patients undergoing lumbar spine surgery.