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.