Studies that recommend early chest tube removal
Three studies from the reviewed studies showed that early chest tube
removal did not affect the increase in pericardial effusion. In the
first group of Abramov et al. (2005), study meantime of removal of chest
tubes was 25 hour and drainage was less than 100 ml over the past eight
hours there was less pericardial effusion than the second group, which
meantime of removal of chest tubes was 48 hour and drainage was less
than 100 ml.
The study by Gercekoglu et al. (2003) conducted in both retrospective
and prospective phases, showed that there was no statistically
significant difference about pleural effusion between the two study
groups and early chest tube removal does not affect the occurrence of
pleural effusion. The mean time for chest tube removal in the early
group was 23 hours and for the late group 48 hours with drainage of less
than 50 mL in the last 5 hours.
The last study in the group recommending the early removal of the chest
tube was the study of Mir-Mohammad Sadeghi et al. (2009). In this study,
the meantime for chest tube removal was 23 hours postoperatively for the
early group, and 40 hours for the late group. No pleural effusion was
observed in either group.