Purpose: Surgical site infections (SSIs) following colorectal surgery is common, and local application of gentamicin for SSIs in the surgery remains controversial.
Objective: To identify whether local application of gentamicin reduces incidence of SSIs in colorectal surgery.
Methods: PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Science Citation Index were searched for relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and reference list up to November 2014. Two independent reviewers screened the records from the electronic databases, selected relevant studies, assessed the methodological quality, and extracted the data from included articles. Stata 12.0 was used to conduct a pooled analysis for main outcomes.
Results: Eight relevant randomized controlled trials with a total of 1685 patients were included in the meta-analysis. All included studies were of moderate to high quality by the Cochrane Collaboration's tool for assessing risk of bias. There was no significant difference being found in the total pooled results for wound infection (relative risk (RR) 0.73, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.47 to 1.12) and organ space infection (RR 0.90, 95% CI 0.51 to 1.59). However, subgroup analysis showed that the significant decrease of wound infection was associated with the population in the Western Europe (RR 0.60, 95% CI 0.42 to 0.87) and follow-up periods of 30 days (RR 0.63, 95% CI 0.42 to 0.94).
Conclusions: Local application of gentamicin significantly reduced incidence of wound infection following colorectal surgery in Western Europe, and it was also associated with lower risk of wound infection during follow-up period of 30 days. However, its effectiveness on prophylaxis of perineal wound infection and organ space infection still lacked evidence.
Keywords: Collagen-gentamicin sponge; Colorectal surgery; Local gentamicin; Surgical site infection.