Overlapping compared with end-to-end repair of third and fourth degree obstetric anal sphincter tears
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE OF REVIEW: There is a significant risk of anal incontinence in women who sustain a third or fourth degree tear of the external anal sphincter (EAS) at the time of delivery. Optimizing the surgical correction of these injuries should result in the best functional outcome for women. The purpose of this review is to examine recent evidence. RECENT FINDINGS: The results of randomized trials are conflicting. Four trials have found no difference between the overlapping and end-to-end repairs. One trial found the overlapping procedure superior and one found the end-to-end procedure to be superior. Repair of the internal anal sphincter is an important part of the surgical repair. Surgeon experience with specific surgical procedures does not significantly affect outcomes. Methodological limitations have compromised the conclusions of the majority of the studies and longer-term follow-up is still needed. SUMMARY: At present, the bulk of the evidence (follow-up to 12 months) finds that there is no difference in symptomatic outcomes between the end-to-end or the overlapping repair of EAS defects. A surgeon should use the technique with which they are most familiar. Obstetricians should familiarize themselves with the most up-to-date evidence concerning the anatomy of the EAS and take care to identify and repair both the internal anal sphincter and EAS at the time of an obstetrical injury. Surgeon experience with specific repair procedures does not affect outcomes of EAS defect repair.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".