What Researchers Did
Researchers studied 211 patients who had a combined procedure (middle meningeal artery embolization plus burr hole drainage) for chronic subdural hematoma to find out what factors were linked to the blood clot coming back after surgery.
What They Found
This retrospective study of 211 patients found that 35 patients (about 16.6%) had their hematoma recur after surgery. Patients were split into a training group of 147 and a validation group of 64 to build a model predicting recurrence. Initial analysis identified six factors linked to recurrence: sex, the amount of fluid drained after surgery, use of statin medication after surgery, use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy after surgery, the patient's Glasgow Coma Scale score at admission, and the size of the hematoma before surgery. The abstract does not report which of these factors increased or decreased the chance of recurrence, or give the final performance numbers for the predictive model.
Canadian Relevance
No direct Canadian connection identified.
Study Limitations
This is a retrospective study with no comparison group, so it can show links between factors and recurrence but cannot prove that any one factor, including hyperbaric oxygen therapy, caused the recurrence.