Pre-Operative Depilatory Cream Hair Removal to Reduce Surgical Site Infection in Patients Undergoing Elective Surgery

Abstract

Surgical site infection (SSI) is a significant cause of morbidity, mortality, and increased hospital stay timeand costs after the operation. This paper aimed to review studies that explored the potential effectivenessof using depilatory cream to decrease the occurrence rate of surgical site infections as early preparation ofcleaning area of the postoperative wound incision. An electronic search was carried out using PubMed andGoogle Scholar data bases. This review showed that there is a little amount of evidence on the effectivenessof using chemical hair removal with patients undergoing elective surgeries to decrease the risk of surgicalsite infections. Depilation before surgery has been used as a procedure to prevent hair from interacting withthe recovering wound area. For preoperative surgical site hair removal, shaving, clipping, and chemicaldepilation are performed in hospitals. Chemical depilation requires adding a hair removal cream to theskin to remove the hair, and when this approach is used for hair removal, it is suggested that injuries andsubsequent wound infection will be less. It is highly recommended that further studies need to be conductedto deeply investigate this area of interest.