A randomized trial of early versus delayed mediastinal drain removal after cardiac surgery using silastic and conventional tubes
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Mediastinal drainage following cardiac surgery with traditional large-bore plastic tubes can be painful and cumbersome. This study was designed to determine whether prolonged drainage (5 days) with a silastic tube decreased the incidence of significant pericardial effusion and tamponade following aortic or valvular surgery. METHODS: One hundred and fifty patients undergoing valvular or aortic surgery in a tertiary cardiac surgery institution were randomized to receive a conventional mediastinal tube plus a silastic Blake drain (n = 75), or two conventional tubes (n = 75). Conventional drains were removed on postoperative day (POD) 1, while Blake drains were removed on POD 5. The primary end-point was the combined incidence of significant pericardial effusion (≥ 15 mm) or tamponade through POD 5. Secondary end-points included total mediastinal drainage, postoperative atrial fibrillation (AF) and pain. RESULTS: Analysis was performed for 67 patients in the Blake group and 73 in the conventional group. There was no difference between the two groups in the combined end-point of significant effusion or tamponade (7.4 vs 8.3%, P = 0.74), or in the incidence of AF (47 vs 46%, P = 0.89). Mean 24-h drainage was greater in the Blake group than in the conventional group (749 ± 444 ml vs 645 ± 618 ml, P < 0.01). Overall incidence of significant pericardial effusion at 30 days was 12.1% (n = 17), with 5% (n = 7) requiring drainage. The Blake group had a numerically lower incidence of effusion requiring drainage at POD 30 (3.0 vs 6.8%, P = 0.44). Postoperative pain was similar between groups. CONCLUSIONS: In patients undergoing ascending aortic or valvular surgery, prolonged drainage with silastic tubes is safe and does not increase postoperative pain. There was no difference between the Blake and conventional drains with regard to significant pericardial effusion or tamponade in this cohort; however, this conclusion is limited by the low overall incidence of the primary outcome in this cohort.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it