Radiological gastrostomy - patient demography

Author

Martin Hennessy

Published

March 13, 2026

Included are data about 1232 gastrostomies performed on 1175 patients between 2014-01-06 and 2025-12-17
Repeat gastrostomies are counted only if the new gastrostomy required a new gastric puncture.
Re-canalisation of existing tracts with a wire are not included.

Gastrostomy demography

The table below summarises the sex and age of gastrostomy patients:

Diagnosis	Patients	Procedures	Men	Women	Mean age (years)	SD	Median age (years)	IQR
All	1,175	1,232	760	415	64	14	66.0	57 - 73
ENT	582	611	402	180	64	10	65.0	58 - 71
MND	177	184	99	78	64	11	66.0	58 - 72
CVA	127	132	69	58	74	13	76.0	67 - 84
INJ	72	83	59	13	58	16	58.5	48 - 70
NEU	89	89	57	32	55	19	60.0	42 - 70
UNK	79	80	47	32	57	23	63.0	41 - 75.5
OES	49	53	27	22	69	10	68.0	60 - 76

Age

In terms of age, the appropriate location and spread of data depends on whether or not it is normally distributed.
For each diagnosis, this can be visualised by histograms, as below:

It can also be tested statistically with the Shapiro Wilk test of normality.
With the null hypothesis being that the population is evenly distributed, the p values are as follows:

ENT: p = 0.00122288691142856
MND: p = 0.0011087080722952
CVA: p = 9.94030112283994e-05
INJ: p = 0.155942145137917
NEU: p = 0.000496076234366161
UNK: p = 0.000237299741540943
OES: p = 0.118071235283747

Mean and standard deviation are appropriate where p > 0.05, median and interquartile range when the opposite is true.
Finally, an idea of the location and spread of the ages as well as the number of patients for each diagnosis can be visualised in a point plot, where each point represents a single patient:

Note, random jitter has been applied to decrease overlap of points on the chart.

Abbreviations used above are as follows:

ENT: ear, nose and throat cancers and their management
MND: motor neurone disease
CVA: stroke
OES: oesophageal disease
NEU: other neurodegenerative diseases
INJ: traumatic brain and spine injuries
UNK: the remaining miscellaneous or un-diagnosed conditions

Monthly mortality variation

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