Annals of surgery
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Review Meta Analysis Comparative Study
Is antibiotic prophylaxis in surgery a generally effective intervention? Testing a generic hypothesis over a set of meta-analyses.
While the main focus of a meta-analysis is often to assess the effectiveness of a particular intervention in managing or curing a specific condition, there exists a substantial amount of information within published systematic reviews that could be used to assess the validity of a generic hypothesis about the effectiveness of an intervention across a range of different but related conditions. ⋯ : As well as antibiotic prophylaxis being a generally effective intervention for preventing postoperative wound infection, the level of this effectiveness would appear to be reasonably independent of what type of surgery is being considered. Therefore, the general prevailing attitude that antibiotic prophylaxis should be assumed to be ineffective unless its effectiveness has been experimentally proven beyond doubt for the specific type of surgery being considered, perhaps should be revised. In particular, perhaps a sensible philosophy would be to assume that antibiotic prophylaxis is effective in reducing the risk of wound infection for all types of surgery, even ones where no clinical trial data exists and make exceptions to this rule if, for certain types of surgery, it can be proved to the contrary.