Surgical site infections (SSIs) are a major postoperative complication after abdominal surgery, especially in the colorectal field. With a reported incidence of over 20%, SSIs significantly increase the length of stay (LOS), readmission rate, expenses, and mortality . Therefore, the identification of an effective method of reducing SSIs incidence is critically important.
Colonic bacterial florae are considered to be the major cause of SSIs after elective colorectal procedures, but the most effective means of decreasing this bacterial load remains under debate. Pre-operative mechanical bowel preparation (MBP) was first utilized by surgeons, as it can theoretically remove stool content and associated bacterial load within the bowel and surgical field, thus reducing risk of SSIs. More recently, as antibiotics have come to be widely utilized, the pre-operative administration of un-absorbed oral antibiotics (OA) in combination with MBP was widely conducted.
Multiple trials have been performed to explore the best bowel preparation strategies, but their results remain controversial. Since 2005, several RCTs and meta-analyses have demonstrated MBP alone was not associated with a reduced incidence of SSIs related to patients that did not undergo MBP, whereas MBP patients exhibited paradoxical increases in postoperative ileus, anastomotic leakage, and other complications. Recently, the merit of OA and MBP has been re-discovered in several related retrospective studies which demonstrated a significant decrease in the rate of SSIs.However, as information in these trials was exacted from national databases without any detailed matching between patient groups, the existence of bias in these trials may affect the validity of their results. Furthermore, none of these studies assessed the relative prophylactic effects of the novel MBP mode in right or left-side colorectal surgery.
