Epidemiological Profile (Age and Sex) of Obscure Intra-Abdominal Masses

History: The old famous aphorism that the abdomen is a "magic box", still stands true inspite of the tremendous advancements in the field of diagnosis.

Aim and Objectives: To know the incidence of obscure intra-abdominal masses as per age and sex of the sufferers and their pathological correlation.

Material and method: This study was conducted on the selected surgical patients in the surgical ward of a tertiary care hospital. A detailed note about age and sex of the sampled cases was obtained in a predrawn proforma.

Biostatics: It was expressed in terms of proportion and ratio.

Findings: More than half (58.4%) of patients belong to 41-60 years of age. As per sex both sexes were equally affected.

Conclusion: As 06 out of 07 in middle age group patients had malignant intra-abdominal tumours, confirmed that malignant tumours were more prone to remain obscure. Therefore this group was more affected in comparison to other age groups. The author also reached to the conclusion that as 83.33% belonged to economically productive age group, which was a real personal as well as social loss in terms of man days.

Recommendations: Apart from age and sex more parameters viz.occupation, income, literary status etc. must be included in future studies. More and more such studies must be done with a larger sample size to get broadened comprehensive picture of the problem.