Background
Hip and knee replacement surgery is a well‐established means of improving quality of life, but is associated with a significant risk of bleeding. One‐third of people are estimated to be anaemic before hip or knee replacement surgery; coupled with the blood lost during surgery, up to 90% of individuals are anaemic postoperatively. As a result, people undergoing orthopaedic surgery receive 3.9% of all packed red blood cell transfusions in the UK. Bleeding and the need for allogeneic blood transfusions has been shown to increase the risk of surgical site infection and mortality, and is associated with an increased duration of hospital stay and costs associated with surgery.
Reducing blood loss during surgery may reduce the risk of allogeneic blood transfusion, reduce costs and improve outcomes following surgery. Several pharmacological interventions are available and currently employed as part of routine clinical care.
Objectives
To determine the relative efficacy of pharmacological interventions for preventing blood loss in elective primary or revision hip or knee replacement, and to identify optimal administration of interventions regarding timing, dose and route, using network meta‐analysis (NMA) methodology.
Search methods
We searched the following databases for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and systematic reviews, from inception to 18 October 2022: CENTRAL (the Cochrane Library), MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase (Ovid), CINAHL (EBSCO
host
), Transfusion Evidence Library (Evidentia), ClinicalTrials.gov and WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP).
Selection criteria
We included RCTs of people undergoing elective hip or knee surgery only.
We excluded non‐elective or emergency procedures, and studies published since 2010 that had not been prospectively registered (Cochrane Injuries policy). There were no restrictions on gender, ethnicity or age (adults only). We excluded studies that used standard of care as the comparator.
Eligible interventions included: antifibrinolytics (tranexamic acid (TXA), aprotinin, epsilon‐aminocaproic acid (EACA)), desmopressin, factor VIIa and XIII, fibrinogen, fibrin sealants and non‐fibrin sealants.
Data collection and analysis
We performed the review according to standard Cochrane methodology. Two authors independently assessed trial eligibility and risk of bias, and extracted data. We assessed the certainty of the evidence using CINeMA. We presented direct (pairwise) results using RevMan Web and performed the NMA using BUGSnet.
We were interested in the following primary outcomes: need for allogenic blood transfusion (up to 30 days) and all‐cause mortality (deaths occurring up to 30 days after the operation), and the following secondary outcomes: mean number of transfusion episodes per person (up to 30 days), re‐operation due to...
