Number of patients requiring post-operative nasogastric tube placement
According to the literature, 18 studies reporting the number of patients requiring post-operative nasogastric tube placement were included although 13 give useable data for statistical analysis17–19,21,23,26,28,32,33,36,41,45,47. A total of 13 studies with 2,803 patients and 6 pharmacological treatments are reported. The extracted data are detailed in Supplemental Table 9.1. The following treatments were studied and included in the network analysis: gastrografin, prokinetics, erythromycin, opioid antagonists, probiotics and dexamethasone. Figure 7.A reports the network map for the 6 pharmacological treatment classes analysed. The main results are reported in Figure 7: network map, relative effect Bayesian plot, rankogram and the surface under the cumulative ranking curve (SUCRA).
None of the studies reached significance for the 6 treatments (Figure 7.B). Erythromycin was the best treatment with a probability of P=0.32. The ranking (rank1+rank2+rank3) in descending order of the top three treatments from the best to the third was as follows: erythromycin had a 63% (0.323+0.18+0.127) probability of being among the top three therapies followed by gastrografin at 59% (0.281+0.183+0.126) and then opioid antagonists with 51% (0.08+0.18+0.25). The bias studies are summarised in Supplemental Figure 9.6. The overall bias was rated low risk in 100% of studies. The highest ratio of some concern was for measurement of the outcomes (23.1%).