The need for hair removal in paediatric brain tumour surgery?

Abstract

Introduction

Preoperative hair removal is conventional practice within neurosurgery in an attempt to maintain antisepsis. However, there is a lack of evidence to suggest that it makes a difference with regards to infection. This article aims to relate preoperative hair removal to SSIs for paediatric patients.

Methods and Materials

A retrospective analysis was conducted from a single paediatric neurosurgical database at the University Hospital of Wales. Patients were grouped according to whether they underwent preoperative hair removal or not. Findings were reviewed in light of the previously published literature.

Results

One hundred eighty two paediatric intracranial tumours were operated on between November 2008 and 2019. A total of twenty-six patients (14%) developed an infection post-operatively, of which meningitis was the most common (77%). Eighty-nine operations were undertaken without preoperative hair removal, of which there were a total of fifteen infections (17%). In the hair removal group, there were a total of eleven infections out of ninety-three operations (12%). Overall, the patients without hair removal had a higher infection rate when compared to those with hair removal (17 and 12% respectively), however, this result was not statistically significant (p-value 0.3989).

Conclusion

We did not find evidence that hair removal in paediatric neurosurgery effects postoperative infection risk.

Keywords:

• Neuro-oncology
• brain tumour
• neurosurgery
• preoperative practice

Acknowledgement

There was no funding required for this article.

Disclosure statement

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest. This article is a prospective review conducted on non-identifiable patient data therefore, ethical approval was not required. All authors have complied with the specific requirements as advised by The Research Ethics Service in the United Kingdom. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Data collection was performed by Alexandra Richards and Paul Leach. Statistical analysis was performed by Malik Zaben. The manuscript was written by Alexandra Richards and Paul Leach. All authors commented on previous versions. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.