Polypropylene vs. stainless-steel wire suture: short-term recurrence rate after shouldice primary inguinal hernia repair, a non-inferior analysis among 1120 patients. A case–control study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Polypropylene material is commonly used for posterior wall reconstruction in hernia repair, in contrast with the classically described stainless-steel wire used at Shouldice Hospital. This study was conducted to evaluate possible differences in Shouldice Repair outcomes using polypropylene or stainless-steel wire sutures. METHODS: A prospective follow-up of consecutive patients who underwent elective unilateral Shouldice primary inguinal hernia repair at Shouldice Hospital between December 6, 2021, and September 1, 2022, was conducted. Data was collected from follow-up telephone calls as well as manually reviewing patient's charts. The primary objective was to determine whether the use of polypropylene was non-inferior to the use of stainless-steel wire, regarding the recurrence rate reported by the patients with a minimum follow-up of 1 year after Shouldice primary inguinal hernia repair. RESULTS: A total of 1120 patients were contacted by telephone (polypropylene: 560; stainless-steel wire: 560). The median follow-up period was 16 months (interquartile range: 15-18). In 22 (1.96%) cases a surgical site infection was diagnosed. There was a total of 18 recurrences reported by the patients (1.6%). There was no statistical difference between the groups (polypropylene: 7 (1.25%) vs. stainless steel wire: 11 (1.96%), p > 0.05) for the recurrence rate. CONCLUSION: The use of polypropylene is non-inferior to the use of stainless-steel wire regarding recurrence rate at a median follow-up period of 16 months after elective unilateral Shouldice primary inguinal hernia repair. This finding may encourage other centers where stainless-steel wire is not easily available to perform the Shouldice 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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".