Quote from: Annah on January 15, 2012, 09:21:46 PM
I am not advocating that post op regret is high. I am explaining that the percentage is higher than 1% and the 1% seemed to be made up...when people throw percentages around on the internet I want sources.
I say 1-1.5% based on the studies I have read.
Here is one:
"Regrets
Immediately after the surgical intervention, certain subjects experience a period of dissatisfaction that can lead to regret. This feeling is generally temporary and most
often disappears during the year following the surgical transformation, without neces-sitating any new interventions [88]. Most often, it results from the confrontation of various difficulties (e.g., post-operative pains, surgical complications, unsatisfactory surgical results, departure of the partner, job loss, family conflicts, etc.). More serious and long-lasting regrets are rare. In a review of the literature, Pfafflin and Junge [89] report less than a percentage of regrets in FM subjects, and from 1% to 1.5% in MF (similar results have been reported by Kuiper: 0.5% in FM, 1.2% in MF subjects [50]) subjects (table II). An examination of the difficulties met by these different subjects reveals three major sources of regret: (1) diagnostic error (certain subjects show clear signs of psychosis); (2) absence of a real life test (the subjects were not part of a prolonged assessment of the adaptation of their new gender); (3) surgical interven-tional protocols which are not adequately adapted and the presence of deceiving surgical results (certain subjects had to wait for long periods of time before being able to proceed to the surgical interventional stage; several subjects suffered from surgical results that were aesthetically unsatisfactory and/or not very functional)."
[Michel A, Ansseau M, Legros JJ, Pitchot W, Mormont C. The transsexual: What about the future? European Psychiatry, 2002;17:353-62, p. 355]
another found 2 persons regretting in a cohort of 188, which is again roughly 1%
[Smith YLS, van Goozen SHM, Kuiper AJ, Verschoor AM, Cohen-Kettenis PT. CHAPTER 5 Predictors of the course and outcomes of sex reassignment - A prospective study I: Sex Reassignment : Predictors and Outcomes Of Treatment for Transsexuals. Universiteit Utrecht, 2002. s. 85-112. URL:
http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2002-0808-103443/inhoud.htm]
The Pfaffin and Junge review quouted in the first article was based on 81 studies from 30 years, if I remember correctly.
The highest percentage of regrets I have seen is 3.8% found in a Swedish study. There is evidence, however that the percentage of regret drops when the surgeons receive more experience i.e. it is low in new studies and studies from high volume centers compared to early studies or studies in low volume centres, which puts Sweden at a disadvantage since they perform much fewer surgeries than for instance Thai and US surgeons.
All in all I believe 1% is a fair estimate in modern surgeries from top doctors, whereas it would probably be A LOT more common in Denmark, where only a single surgery is done every one or two years.
