Ricerc@Sapienza

Background: Current guidelines state that the Shouldice technique has lower recurrence rates than other suture repairs and therefore is strongly recommended in non-mesh inguinal hernia repair. Recently a new tissue repair technique has been proposed by Desarda and studied in trials against Lichtenstein technique. Methods: The present study was performed according to the PRISMA Statement for Network Meta-analysis and the AMSTAR 2 checklist.

Purpose: Inguinal hernia repair is one of the most performed procedure all over the world with more than 20 million procedures performed each year. Due to the lack of data in literature about the learning curve of the Lichtenstein procedure, we decided to reproduce a research on learning curves with the same methodology proposed in our previous study about laparoscopic hernia repair. The aim of this multicentre study was to analyse how many cases are required to achieve the learning curve for a Lichtenstein procedure.