ArticleJournal of anesthesia2026
Deep versus moderate neuromuscular blockade on postoperative recovery quality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.
Article in Journal of anesthesia, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeAdvances in neuromuscular monitoring and reversal agents have facilitated the widespread clinical adoption of deep neuromuscular blockade (dNMB). Nevertheless, whether dNMB improves postoperative recovery quality compared with moderate neuromuscular blockade (mNMB) remains unclear.
methodsWe systematically searched PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library up to January 31, 2026. Eligible studies were randomized controlled trials (RCTs) enrolling adult surgical patients, comparing dNMB versus mNMB, and reporting postoperative recovery quality measured by the Quality of Recovery-40 (QoR-40) or Quality of Recovery-15 (QoR-15) questionnaire. Pooled standardized mean differences (SMDs) or mean differences (MDs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated. The Cochrane RoB 2 tool was used to assess risk of bias, and the GRADE approach was applied to evaluate the certainty of evidence. The study protocol was registered in PROSPERO (CRD420261302047).
resultsA total of five RCTs encompassing 507 patients were included in the analysis. dNMB did not demonstrate superior postoperative recovery quality on postoperative day 1 (POD 1) (SMD = 0.36, 95% CI =-0.01 to 0.72) or POD 2 (SMD = -0.04, 95% CI = -0.35 to 0.27).
conclusionCompared with mNMB, dNMB did not appear to improve recovery quality on the first or second postoperative day. Nevertheless, owing to the low certainty of evidence, well-designed, large-scale RCTs are still needed to validate these results.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.