Drains in Breast Reduction: How Good Is the Recommendation Not to Use Them?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A clinical practice guideline (CPG) from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended not to use drains in breast reduction. This CPG was based on 3 randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The objective of this review was to double-check the methodological quality of the 3 RCTs. These RCTs were critically appraised using: (1) the "User's Guide to the Surgical Literature" checklist to critically appraise the methodological quality, (2) the CONSORT guidelines for reporting quality, and (3) the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool 2 (RoB 2) for risk of bias. Weaknesses were identified in all assessments for the 3 RCTs. Items with the poorest adherence in the "User's Guide" included: "Were patients stratified?," "Was follow-up complete?," and "Were all clinically important outcomes considered?" The overall adherence to the CONSORT reporting checklist across all 3 studies was moderate with 40.0%, 62.1%, and 48.3% adherence. All 3 RCTs had a similar low to moderate risk of bias, with no areas with a high risk of bias. None of the studies took into consideration a single critical outcome (such as major hematoma) and the outcome's minimally important difference as the basis for the sample size and power calculation of the study. All 3 RCTs additionally lacked clear reporting of treatment effect sizes or precision of estimates. Our re-examination of the evidence questions the recommendation of the CPG. We believe that the recommendation should have been: "We remain uncertain whether drains in breast reduction have a salutary effect." As such, we recommend that a methodologically robust RCT be conducted to resolve the question of whether drains should be used in breast reduction.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".