Mechanical Bowel Preparation and Oral Antibiotics Before Colon Cancer Surgery

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Preoperative mechanical bowel preparation (MBP) has been proposed in an attempt to reduce the colonic fecal load and to limit the risk of surgical site contamination, thus theoretically limiting the risk of postoperative SSI. However, several randomized-controlled trials (RCT) and meta-analyses, hav...

Preoperative mechanical bowel preparation (MBP) has been proposed in an attempt to reduce the colonic fecal load and to limit the risk of surgical site contamination, thus theoretically limiting the risk of postoperative SSI. However, several randomized-controlled trials (RCT) and meta-analyses, have suggested the absence of benefit, in term of postoperative morbidity, of preoperative MBP before elective colon cancer surgery. A meta-analysis of RCT, comparing MBP to no-MBP before elective colon cancer surgery, even suggested that MBP could be associated with an increased SSI rate, as compared to no-MBP. These results led the latest French surgical guidelines of the Société Française de Chirurgie Digestive (SFCD) to recommend the absence of MBP before elective colon cancer surgery. However, recent studies suggested that the adjunction of oral antibiotics during MBP could help efficiently reduce the risk of postoperative SSI. Indeed, a recent meta-analysis of RCT have suggested that patients preoperatively receiving both MBP and oral antibiotics were exposed to a significantly reduced risk of postoperative SSI, as compared to patients receiving only preoperative MBP. This result was confirmed in a recent RCT which compared preoperative MBP and oral antibiotics versus MBP alone in a heterogeneous population of patients who underwent laparoscopic colonic or rectal surgery. This latter study reported a 50% reduction of SSI rate in the "MBP and oral antibiotics" group, as compared to the "MBP alone" group. Finally, three recent large retrospective registry studies compared the outcomes of four different strategies of preoperative colonic preparation before colorectal surgery: 1) MBP and oral antibiotics, 2) MBP alone, 3) Oral antibiotics alone, and 4) No colonic preparation. However, to date, no RCT has compared the "No preparation" group, which is the gold standard according to the international and French guidelines, to the "MBP and oral antibiotics" group. The present study is therefore the first double-blinded RCT to compare the SSI rate for 4 types of colonic preparation before elective laparoscopic colonic surgery: 1) MBP and oral antibiotics, 2) MBP alone, 3) Oral antibiotics alone, and 4) No preparation.

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