Present and future of prophylactic antibiotics for severe acute pancreatitis

Figure 1 The flow chart of literature search and selection in PubMed.

Figure 2 Updated meta-analysis of antibiotic prophylaxis vs placebo/none-treatment. The meta-analysis was stratified into two periods, i.e., before 2000 and from 2000. In the later period, no benefit was obtained from prophylactic antibiotics (RR = 1.01, P=0.98; Mantel-Haenszel test, fixed effect model, two-sided).

Figure 3 Funnel plot of the meta-analysis. Apparently asymmetrical distribution was found in the period before 2000.

Figure 4 Linear correlation of accumulated sample size from 2000. There is highly positive correlation between the accumulated sample size and the year from 2000 (r = 0.954, P = 0.000; Pearson correlation test, two-sided).