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 time
and costs after the operation. This paper aimed to review studies that explored the potential effectiveness
of using depilatory cream to decrease the occurrence rate of surgical site infections as early preparation of
cleaning area of the postoperative wound incision. An electronic search was carried out using PubMed and
Google Scholar data bases. This review showed that there is a little amount of evidence on the effectiveness
of using chemical hair removal with patients undergoing elective surgeries to decrease the risk of surgical
site infections. Depilation before surgery has been used as a procedure to prevent hair from interacting with
the recovering wound area. For preoperative surgical site hair removal, shaving, clipping, and chemical
depilation are performed in hospitals. Chemical depilation requires adding a hair removal cream to the
skin to remove the hair, and when this approach is used for hair removal, it is suggested that injuries and
subsequent wound infection will be less. It is highly recommended that further studies need to be conducted
to deeply investigate this area of interest.