Antibiotic prophylaxis in breast surgery: a meta-analysis to identify the optimal strategy to reduce infection rates in breast surgery.

Intro: Breast surgeries are an increasingly frequent operation, with an exponential rise in breast cancer diagnoses, and women opting for cosmetic surgeries. SSIs are the most common post-operative complication with many negative consequences including sepsis and even death. These are treated with prophylactic antibiotics prior to surgery. Breast surgery is currently defined as 'clean', although literature indicates that the infection rate is higher than should be expected for this classification. The aim of this meta-analysis is to evaluate whether pre-operative antibiotics reduce SSI frequency and which class of antibiotics achieve the best reduction.

Methods: A literature search through online libraries was used to find clinical trials investigating pre-breast-surgery antibiotics and SSI frequency. These were grouped all together and separately by class of antibiotics. Additionally studies investigating breast cancer surgeries and non-cancer surgeries were grouped separately. A forest-plot was created for each group to calculate an estimated effect, these were then compared against each other.

Results: Use of antibiotics resulted in a reduction in SSI frequency by 3.55% overall, and reduced frequency in all types of surgeries performed. Cephalosporins reduced SSI frequency by 2.23%, Beta-lactamase inhibitors 4.17% and macrolides achieved the greatest effect with a 14.58% reduction.

Conclusion: This meta-analysis proves that antibiotics reduce SSI frequency in breast surgery and supports the notion to remove the 'clean' classification. This definition may result in failure to provide prophylaxis, resulting in patients suffering from preventable SSIs and their negative consequences. Macrolides were the most effective followed by beta-lactamase inhibitors and cephalosporins, this may be implemented in structuring new guidelines favouring use of macrolides before conducting breast surgery.