Patient demographics
We identified 28219 patients who underwent appendectomy; 95 (0.3%) had a synchronous cancer diagnosis and/or were undergoing chemotherapy. The group was 59.7% male with a median age of 11 years (interquartile range, 8-14). WBC counts were missing in 3155 (11.2%) of patients. American Society of Anesthesia (ASA) Class was missing in 18 (0.06%) of patients. No statistically significant differences were observed between the patients on the basis of age, gender, race, cardiac risk factors, proportion of cases performed laparoscopically or proportion of cases found to have perforated appendicitis. Patients with cancer had lower WBC counts and higher ASA Classes than those without (Table 1).