Timing of planned reoperation after damage control surgery in patients with trauma: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Damage control surgery (DCS) is the standard approach for managing severely injured patients with trauma who present with extreme physiological derangements. The optimal timing for planned reoperation after the initial DCS remains contentious. Although traditional guidelines recommend reoperation within 24–48 h, emerging evidence suggests this interval may not be appropriate for all patients. This systematic review and meta-analysis evaluated the impact of early versus delayed planned reoperations on the clinical outcomes in patients with trauma following DCS. Methods This review adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines (PROSPERO registration: CRD420251049990). PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library were searched from inception to 28 July 2025. Eligible studies compared early (≤ 48 h) with delayed (> 48 h) planned reoperation after DCS in adult patients with trauma. The primary outcome was re-bleeding; secondary outcomes were in-hospital mortality and infection rates. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale, and the certainty of evidence was graded using the GRADE approach. Meta-analysis was conducted using random-effects models. Results Seven retrospective cohort studies involving 965 patients met the inclusion criteria. No prospective or randomised controlled trials were identified. Early planned reoperation was associated with significantly higher re-bleeding rates (OR 3.01; 95% CI 1.21–7.51; P = 0.02), indicating three-fold higher odds of re-bleeding with early intervention compared to delayed reoperation. No significant differences were observed in mortality (OR 0.79; 95% CI 0.51–1.23; P = 0.29; I 2 = 0%) or infection rates (OR 1.05; 95% CI 0.54–2.05; P = 0.89; I 2 = 65%). Conclusions Delayed planned reoperation beyond 48 h after DCS significantly reduces the risk of re-bleeding, without increasing mortality or infection rates. These findings support an individualised approach to reoperation timing guided by patient physiology, rather than rigid adherence to conventional 24- to 48-h protocols.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".