The impact of negative pressure wound therapy on surgical wound infection, hospital stay and postoperative complications after spinal surgery: A meta‐analysis

Abstract

To systematically assess the effect of negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) on postoperative surgical wound infection, length of hospital stay and postoperative complications after spinal surgery. Relevant studies on the application of NPWT in spinal surgery were conducted via a computerised database search, including PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Wanfang, from inception to June 2023. The identified literature was rigorously screened and data extraction was performed by two investigators independently. The quality of the relevant studies was evaluated using the Newcastle–Ottawa scale (NOS). The effect size for count data was determined by the odds ratio (OR), while the impact size for measurement data was expressed as the standardised mean difference (SMD). The 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated for each effect magnitude. Stata 17.0 software was used for the meta‐analysis. Ten papers, totalling 1448 patients, were finally included. This study demonstrated that NPWT led to a statistically significant reduction in the occurrence of postoperative surgical wound infections (OR: 0.377, 95% CI: 0.238–0.598, p < 0.001), fewer postoperative complications (OR: 0.526, 95% CI: 0.360–0.770, p = 0.001) and a shortened hospital stay (SMD: −0.678, 95%CI: −1.324 to −0.031, p = 0.040) after spinal surgery compared with the control group. When compared with other treatment approaches, NPWT also demonstrated a substantial reduction in surgical wound infections and postoperative complications, as well as a shorter duration of hospitalisation after spinal surgery.