How Dexamethasone Affects Necessity for Surgical Intervention for Chronic Subdural Hematoma: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The effectiveness of dexamethasone in managing chronic subdural hematoma (cSDH) patients remains uncertain although the drug is widely used in this condition. The present systematic review aims to understand the role of dexamethasone in reducing the need for surgery in cSDH patients. This study was conducted as per the 2020 Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. We searched the electronic databases of PubMed, SCOPUS, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (the Cochrane Library), and ScienceDirect with a predefined search strategy. The population consisted of cSDH patients older than 18 years and treated primarily with dexamethasone. The primary outcome was the need for surgery after dexamethasone therapy in cSDH patients. The meta-analysis of a group of patients was done with the invariance method to estimate the pooled odds of the requirement for surgery after dexamethasone therapy. In the studies with a one-to-one comparison of dexamethasone with placebo/observation, the Mantel–Haenszel statistics were used to determine the odds of surgery. The quality of the studies was assessed with the Newcastle–Ottawa scale (NOS) and the Cochrane risk of bias tool was used to assess the risk of bias in randomized studies. In total, 598 studies were obtained from the database search and after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 10 studies were finally selected for the qualitative and quantitative synthesis. One of the 10 studies was a randomized controlled trial (RCT), while the rest were observational studies. There were 653 patients who received the primary dexamethasone therapy. Of these, 388 patients did not require surgery, while 256 needed surgeries after the therapy. The pooled estimate of requirement for surgery after dexamethasone therapy was 0.41, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.37 to 0.45. A meta-analysis of the one-to-one comparison from three included studies showed a higher need of surgery in the (comparator) placebo/observation group than in the dexamethasone group with odds ratio of 7.16 (95% confidence interval: 2.21–23.13, with p = 0.0001). In addition, we identified the gaps in literature, and the complications and mortality reported in the studies. Dexamethasone is effective in reducing the requirement for surgery in some selected cSDH cases, although many patients still require surgical intervention.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".