Effects and safety of intraoperative intermittent pneumatic compression for preventing postoperative venous thromboembolism: a meta-analysis

Abstract

IntroductionIntermittent pneumatic compression (IPC) has been used for venous thrombosis (VTE) prevention. It’s necessary to evaluate the effects and safety of intraoperative use of IPC devices in the prevention of VTE in surgical patients.Material and methodsTwo authors independently searched the PubMed, Cochrane Library, MedLine, EMbase, China national knowledge infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang databases for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and cohort studies on the use of IPC in surgical patients up to June 10, 2021. The Cochrane Collaborations risk of bias tool and Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) were used for quality assessment. RevMan 5.3 software were used for statistical analyses.ResultsA total of 13 studies including seven RCTs and six retrospective cohort studies involving 6673 surgical patients were included, 1883 patients underwent IPC intervention. The synthesized RCT results indicated that IPC was beneficial to the reduce the incidence of DVT (RR0.30, 95%CI0.22~0.40, P<0.001) and VTE (RR0.51, 95%CI0.27~0.95, P=0.03). The synthesized results from retrospective cohort studies indicated that IPC is beneficial to the reduce the incidence of DVT (RR0.63, 95%CI0.42~0.96, P=0.03) and PE (RR0.34, 95%CI0.16~0.72, P=0.005). No significant publication biases were found for all synthesized outcomes (all p>0.05).ConclusionsIPC seems to be safe and effective in the prevention and management of intraoperative VTE. Limited by sample size, this conclusion still needs to be further confirmed by large-sample, multi-center, high-quality clinical studies.