Impact of The COVID-19 Pandemic on Salivary Gland-Related Healthcare Interventions; A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants has raised concerns regarding their potential impact on perioperative outcomes. Its effect on patients undergoing surgery for salivary gland diseases remains unclear. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on salivary gland-related healthcare interventions, including cancer treatments, sialendoscopy procedures, and parotid surgery outcomes. Materials and Methods: Following PRISMA guidelines, a systematic search was conducted in PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science (2019-2025) for studies reporting pre- and during-COVID data. Two reviewers independently screened records, extracted data, and assessed risk of bias using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. A random-effects meta-analysis was performed to pool odds ratios (ORs) for intervention outcomes. Results: Four studies (n=7,740 participants) were included. The pooled OR for salivary gland interventions during versus pre-COVID was 1.08 (95% CI: 0.88-1.33, P=0.45), indicating no significant change, with moderate heterogeneity (I²=46%). Subgroup analyses revealed increased odds of wound dehiscence post-parotid surgery (OR=4.40, 95% CI: 1.18-16.40) but no significant differences in delayed cancer diagnosis or urgent sialendoscopy. Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic did not significantly alter overall salivary gland intervention rates or adverse events, though some procedural complications increased non-significantly. Limited evidence underscores the need for larger, standardized studies. While this shows that surgeons maintained quality of practice in this era during the COVID-19.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".