Among the primary outcomes of interest was infectious complications or the number of patients with infectious complications. We used infectious complications as defined by the original authors. Secondary outcomes included wound infections, noninfectious complications, and hospital length of stay. For data expressed as an event, the numbers

of patients with the event Dasatinib ic50 and sample size for each group in each study were entered into the analyses. All data reported from the individual studies are expressed as an odds ratio (OR) with the associated 95% CI. For length of stay (LOS), the mean, SD, and number of patients for each group were entered into the analyses. The difference in the means, SEs, and associated 95% CIs were calculated. A random effects model was used to calculate all summary parameters. The

random effects model is used when studies are not Staurosporine purchase functionally similar and/or cannot be assumed to all have a common effect size. Under the random effects model, the assumption is that each study is estimating a unique effect, and therefore, the null hypothesis is that the mean of the true effects is zero. The studies included in this analysis contained different populations (eg, cancer and noncancer), different supplement durations, and different control ONS products, therefore, a priori it was decided they were heterogeneous and the random effects model was appropriate. Forest plots were prepared to graphically represent the meta-analysis; the area of each square is proportional to the study’s click here weight in the meta-analysis and the diamond depicts the overall summary and 95% CI of the analysis. Analyses were performed using the software package Comprehensive Meta-Analysis, version 2 (Biostat, Inc.). Sixteen studies of the use of preoperative IN were identified. One study8 was excluded from our analysis because it was a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data. The Preferred Reporting of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses flow diagram in Figure 1 summarizes the process. Of the 15 studies, 2 had multiple arms, which

allowed them to be used in both subsets of analyses. Sufficient data were available for the analysis for 4 clinically relevant outcomes: wound infections, all infectious complications, noninfectious complications, and LOS. Five hundred and sixty-one patients in 8 RCTs9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 of preoperative IN vs ONS were identified (Table 1) and 895 patients in 9 RCTs of IN vs no supplements were also identified (Table 2).11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 When compared with ONS, preoperative IN was not associated with a reduced rate of wound infection (OR = 0.97; 95% CI, 0.45–2.11; p = 0.94), all infectious complications (OR = 0.71; 95% CI, 0.30–1.68; p = 0.44), noninfectious complications (OR = 1.25; 95% CI, 0.64–2.43; p = 0.52), or LOS (mean difference 0.07; 95% CI, −2.29 to 2.43; p = 0.96) (Fig. 2).