Efficacy of Botulinum Toxin Applied Immediately After Wound Closure on Scars Quality Assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Botulinum toxin (BTX) is considered an efficient and safe therapy for postoperative scars that improves visual and functional quality. However, the optimal timing for injection remains under debate due to conflicting evidence. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of BTX applied immediately after wound closure in the quality assessment of postoperative scars. METHODS: This is a systematic review and meta-analysis following the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) 2020 guidelines. Searches were performed in PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Cochrane until September 10, 2024, including randomized or prospective studies on BTX applied immediately after wound closure, with exclusions for keloids or hypertrophic scars treatment studies, non-English studies, reviews, case reports, letters, and abstracts. The quality of scars was assessed using appropriate and widely validated tests and scales when at least 3 studies selected in the meta-analysis utilized them. The mean difference (MD) was used to explore the difference among different groups. RESULTS: Nine randomized trials and 1 prospective study in a total of 521 were identified in this meta-analysis. BTX showed no significant difference in Vancouver Scar Scale score (MD = -0.35, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -1.01 to 0.30, P = 0.29) compared with control, higher visual analog scale score (MD = 1.29, 95% CI = 0.68 to 1.90, P < 0.01), and reduced scar width (MD = -0.19, 95% CI = -0.30 to -0.09, P < 0.01). No adverse events were found in the included studies. CONCLUSIONS: This meta-analysis demonstrated that BTX injections immediately after wound closure are safe and improve scars quality. BTX time of injection requires further studies to provide better clinical applications.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".