Background: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a serious, sometimes life-threatening complication that can occur following spine surgery. The incidence of VTE, and the optimal type and timing of thromboprophylaxis for this complication in elective spine surgery is a matter of debate. Objective: To perform a systematic review with the aim of clarifying the efficacy and adverse effects of mechanical and chemical prophylaxis for preventing thromboembolic complications in elective spine surgery for conditions other than trauma and malignant disease. Methods/design: A search strategy of related articles up to March 2018 was designed and executed in Medline and Embase. Patients: adolescents (>10 years) and adults undergoing elective surgery for spinal deformity or degenerative disease (from C1 to S1). Intervention: Perioperative mechanical and chemical thromboprophylaxis. Studies could be randomized controlled trials or observational studies that reported data on any relevant clinical outcomes. Results: In total, 2451 uniquecitations were identified and 35 studies were ultimately included in the systematic review. The overall mean incidence of complications was 3.7% for deep venous thrombosis, 0.0% for pulmonary embolism, and 3.7% for bleeding in chemoprophylaxis group; 2.9% for deep venous thrombosis, 0.4% for pulmonary embolism and 0.0% for bleeding in mechanoprophylaxis; and 0.7% for deep venous thrombosis, 0.1% for pulmonary embolism and 0.2% for bleeding in mixed prophylaxis group with no specific data on these rates for the type of patient and type and location of surgery. None of the articles retrieved provided information on the adolescent population. Discussion and Conclusions: The poor design and high variability among the studies regarding characteristics of study population, details of interventions, and definitions of outcomes, determines a low quality of the available evidence and limits the interpretation of the results. We were unable to identify a clear advantage of one type of thromboprophylaxis over the other, although there was an increased risk of bleeding with chemoprophylaxis, which could favor the use of mechanoprophylaxis in this scenario.

Objective: To identify, describe, and organize the available evidence regarding systemic oncological treatments compared to best supportive care (BSC) for advanced gastresophageal cancer.Methods: We conducted a thorough search across MEDLINE (PubMed), EMbase (Ovid), The Cochrane Library, Epistemonikos, PROSPERO, and Clinicaltrials.gov. Our inclusion criteria encompassed systematic reviews, randomized controlled trials, quasi‐experimental and observational studies involving patients with advanced esophageal or gastric cancer receiving chemotherapy, immunotherapy or biological/targeted therapy compared to BSC. The outcomes included survival, quality of life, functional status, toxicity, and quality of end‐of‐life care.Results: We included and mapped 72 studies, comprising SRs, experimental and observational designs, 12 on esophageal cancer, 51 on gastric cancer, and 10 both locations. Most compared schemes including chemotherapy (47 studies), but did not report therapeutic lines. Moreover, BSC as a control arm was poorly defined, including integral support and placebo. Data favor the use of systemic oncological treatments in survival outcomes and BSC in toxicity. Data for outcomes including quality of life, functional status, and quality of end‐of‐life care were limited. We found sundry evidence gaps specifically in assessing new treatments such as immunotherapy and important outcomes such as functional status, symptoms control, hospital admissions, and the quality of end‐life care for all the treatments.Conclusions: There are important evidence gaps regarding new for patients with advanced gastresophageal cancer and the effect of systemic oncological treatments on important patient‐centered outcomes beyond survival. Future research should clearly describe the population included, specifying previous treatments and considering therapeutic, and consider all patient‐centered outcomes. Otherwise, it will be complex to apply research results into practice.

Purpose: To identify, describe, and organise currently available evidence regarding systemic oncological treatments (SOTs) (chemotherapy, targeted/biological therapies, and immunotherapy) compared to best supportive care (BSC) for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer (PC). Methods: We conducted a scoping review and evidence mapping, adhering to PRISMA-ScR checklist. We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, Epistemonikos, PROSPERO, and clinicaltrials.gov for eligible studies. We included systematic reviews (SRs), randomised controlled trials (RCTs), quasi-experimental, and observational studies evaluating SOTs compared to BSC or no treatment in patients with advanced PC. Two independent reviewers performed the screening process and data extraction. We developed evidence maps as an interactive visualization display, including the assessed interventions and outcomes. Results: Of the 50,601 records obtained from our search, we included 43 studies: 2 SRs, 16 RCTs, 4 quasi-experimental studies, 20 observational studies, and 1 protocol for a quasi-experimental study. Forty-two studies reported survival-related outcomes and most favoured SOTs, while five reported toxicity and most favoured BSC. Other patient-centred outcomes, such as quality of life, were scarcely reported. Conclusions: This study highlights the current evidence gaps in studies assessing treatments for patients with advanced PC, mainly the lack of reports of non-survival-related outcomes, pointing out research areas that need further attention to make better recommendations for these patients.

Background: The trade-off between systemic oncological treatments (SOTs) and UPSC in patients with primary advanced hepatobiliary cancers (HBCs) is not clear in terms of patient-centred outcomes beyond survival. This overview aims to assess the effectiveness of SOTs (chemotherapy, immunotherapy and targeted/biological therapies) versus UPSC in advanced HBCs. Methods: We searched for systematic reviews (SRs) in PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, Epistemonikos and PROSPERO. Two authors assessed eligibility independently and performed data extraction. We estimated the quality of SRs and the overlap of primary studies, performed de novo meta-analyses and assessed the certainty of evidence for each outcome. Results: We included 18 SRs, most of which were of low quality and highly overlapped. For advanced hepatocellular carcinoma, SOTs showed better overall survival (HR = 0.62, 95% CI 0.55–0.77, high certainty for first-line therapy; HR = 0.85, 95% CI 0.79–0.92, moderate certainty for second-line therapy) with higher toxicity (RR = 1.18, 95% CI 0.87–1.60, very low certainty for first-line therapy; RR = 1.58, 95% CI 1.28–1.96, low certainty for second-line therapy). Survival was also better for SOTs in advanced gallbladder cancer. No outcomes beyond survival and toxicity could be meta-analysed. Conclusion: SOTs in advanced HBCs tend to improve survival at the expense of greater toxicity. Future research should inform other patient-important outcomes to guide clinical decision making.