N Y Hoe | PubMed Health

PubMed1985

Is preoperative shaving really necessary?

A randomised prospective study was done to assess the necessity of shaving before operation. Seven hundred and sixteen cases were included in this study. The traditional method of preoperative skin preparation which employs routine shaving and using cetrimide and chlorhexidine in alcohol for cleansing was compared with an alternate method without preoperative shaving. The clean wound infection rate was 5.08% for the traditional method group and 5.56% for the alternate method group. The results suggest that routine shaving, as part of preoperative preparation, has no advantage in reducing wound infection rate.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Perioperative blood transfusion and survival of breast cancer patients after modified radical mastectomy.

To investigate the effect of perioperative blood transfusion on the survival of patients with breast cancer, the authors reviewed the clinical records of 455 patients who underwent modified radical mastectomy between 1960 and 1979. Thirty-eight patients (8.4%) received blood transfusions. For stage I patients who received perioperative transfusions, 5- and 10-year survival rates were 53% and 47%; for the no-transfusion group, the rates were 93% and 85%. There was also a significant difference in disease-free survival for stage I patients: for the transfusion group, 5- and 10-year survival rates were 47%; for the group not receiving a transfusion, the rates were 89% and 84%. For stage II patients, there was no difference in total or disease-free survival between those who received transfusions and those who did not, and both groups had comparable distribution of nodes.

Blood Transfusion↗