Telephone instructions improve the quality of bowel preparation for colonoscopy: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Xueqian He; Xiaoju Lei; Jiaqi Li; Peng Li

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0289063

Telephone instructions improve the quality of bowel preparation for colonoscopy: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

PLoS One. 2023 Nov 22;18(11):e0289063. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289063. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Xueqian He^{1

2}, Xiaoju Lei³, Jiaqi Li⁴, Peng Li⁴

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory Medicine Center, Department of Clinical Laboratory, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital (Affiliated People's Hospital), Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
² Department of Clinical Laboratory, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
³ Endoscopy Center, Nursing Department, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital (Affiliated People's Hospital), Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
⁴ Cancer Center, Department of Gastroenterology, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital (Affiliated People's Hospital), Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the effect of telephone instructions on the quality of bowel preparation in patients undergoing colonoscopy.

Methods: Online English databases (PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and Embase) were screened for randomized controlled trials on telephone instructions regarding bowel preparation for colonoscopy from inception to April 15, 2022. After data extraction, the Review Manager software was used for meta-analysis.

Results: Nine randomized controlled trials with 3,836 patients were included in the meta-analysis. The rate of adequate bowel preparation was significantly higher in the telephone group than in the control group. The pooled relative risk (RR) was 1.17 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.05-1.30, P < 0.01). The pooled mean difference (MD) for the Boston Bowel Preparation Scale score was 1.32 (95% CI: 0.15-2.49, P < 0.05), and that for the Ottawa Bowel Preparation Scale score was -1.93 (95% CI: -2.35 to -1.51, P < 0.01). The polyp detection rate was significantly higher in the telephone group than in the control group (RR = 1.58, 95% CI: 1.23-2.04, P < 0.01), whereas no significant difference was noted in the adenoma detection rate between the groups (RR = 1.37, 95% CI: 0.97-1.94, P = 0.08).

Conclusion: Telephone instructions for patients undergoing colonoscopy significantly improved the quality of bowel preparation and increased polyp detection rate.

Copyright: © 2023 He et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Meta-Analysis

MeSH terms

Cathartics*
Colonoscopy
Humans
Polyps*
Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
Telephone

Substances

Cathartics

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the General Scientific Research Projects of Department of Education of Zhejiang Province (No. Y202249351) obtained by the corresponding author. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.