The serratus plane block for postoperative analgesia in breast and thoracic surgery: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and objectives The serratus plane block (SPB) is a novel chest wall interfascial plane block. Its analgesic efficacy compared with non-block care and paravertebral block (PVB) is unestablished. Methods We conducted a random-effects meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) recruiting adult surgical patients that compared a SPB to non-block care or PVB for postoperative analgesia. Visual analog scale pain scores were the primary outcome. Database sources were Medline, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar searched up to July 29, 2019 without language restriction. Risk of bias was assessed using Cochrane methodology. Results Nineteen RCTs that comprised 1260 patients were included. Six trials involved thoracic surgery patients and 13 studied breast surgery patients. SPB reduced pain scores 0 hour postoperatively (−1.62 cm; 99% CI −2.43 to −0.81; p<0.001; I 2 =92%), at 2–4 hours (−1.29 cm; 99% CI −2.08 to −0.49; p<0.001; I 2 =92%), at 6 hours (−1.69 cm; 99% CI −3.19 to −0.20; p=0.004; I 2 =99%), and up to 24 hours compared with non-block care. SPB also prolonged the time to first analgesic request (193.2 min; 95% CI 7.2 to 379.2 min; p=0.04; I 2 =99%), reduced 24-hour postoperative opioid consumption (−11.27 mg of IV morphine equivalent; −17.36 to −5.18 mg; p<0.001), and reduced postoperative nausea and vomiting (RR 0.51; 95% CI 0.38 to 0.68; p<0.001; I 2 =12%). In contrast, no meaningful differences were detected in any of the outcomes for the SPB versus PVB data. Conclusions SPB reduced postoperative pain scores (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation rating: low; due to heterogeneity and deficiencies in blinding) in breast and thoracic surgery patients compared with non-block care. Based on five trials only, SPB was not appreciably different from PVB.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.012 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".