Chewing gum may help people to recover more quickly from colon surgery, a new study suggests.

Abdominal surgery can cause intestinal function to slow down or stop, which can result in pain, vomiting and abdominal swelling, as well as longer hospital stays, increased risk of infection and breathing problems.

It's thought that people who have had colon operations should start eating again soon afterwards to kick-start the intestines into working.

It takes time before normal intenstinal function returns after abdominal surgery.

But it can take days before the colon starts to contract normally. One study suggests 20 per cent of patients don't tolerate being given water four hours after the surgery.

Dr. Kenneth Waxman, a general surgeon at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital in California, thought chewing gum might trigger the needed release of hormones into the intestinal tract without filling up the stomach.

To test the idea, Waxman and his colleagues studied 34 patients who had part of their large intestine removed because of cancer or other illness.

Half of the participants were randomly chosen to chew one stick of sugarless gum three times a day beginning the morning after their surgeries until their first bowel movement.

The rest, who were matched for age, sex and illness, were not given gum and acted as controls.

In the February issue of the Archives of Surgery, the researchers report:

• The gum-chewing group left the hospital an average of 2.5 days before the control group.
• Those who chewed gum also passed gas sooner (65.4 hours vs. 80.2 hours post-surgery).
• Gum chewers had their first bowel movement earlier (after 63.2 hours compared with 89.4 hours).

Neither group showed major complications.

Gum-chewing may serve as an inexpensive way to reduce the cost of post-operative bowel dysfunction or "ileus," which is estimated to cost the U.S. health-care system $750 million US a year.

The team acknowledges the study is small, but the results were convincing enough to them that the hospital now routinely prescribes gum to all abdominal surgery patients.

The study's authors propose further research to explore why chewing gum seems to help after gastrointestinal surgery, and to test if certain flavours work better than others.