2013 Aug 08

New search has been performed

In the previous version (Chin 2010), the databases were searched until September 2008. For this update, we re‐ran the searches until 7 June 2013.

The risk of bias tool was updated.

The abstract and plain language summary were updated.

The discussion section was updated.

2012 Aug 08

New citation required and conclusions have changed

This review is an update of the previous Cochrane systematic review (Chin 2010) that included 15 randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Two new authors, Sanjib Das Adhikary and Husni Alakkad, have replaced the previous authors Veerabadran Velayutham and Victor Chee in updating this version.

We identified 13 potential new papers, we included seven studies that met our inclusion criteria. We excluded two papers which were non‐RCTs and two studies which did not examine the outcomes of interest in this review. Two additional studies were only published as abstracts and were not included or analysed as data and methodological details were lacking.

In general our review reaches the same primary conclusions as Chin 2010. However the inclusion of more trials increased the precision of the estimates of the relative risk of inadequate surgical anaesthesia, and removed some of the slight differences in secondary outcomes and subgroup analyses that had been noted in the previous review (Chin 2010), e.g. risk of requiring supplementation, risk of inadequate surgical anaesthesia in studies using weight‐based local anaesthetic dosing. We also applied several additional sensitivity and subgroup analyses, which supported the overall results.

2010 Feb 15

Amended

1. Abstract conclusion re‐worded to reflect the points made in the conclusion of the review.

2. Risk of bias graph and risk of bias summary figures added to review

2008 Sep 01

Amended

Converted to new review format.