Review of anti-adhesion prophylaxis methods – the past and the present

Abstract

Abstract Formation of postoperative adhesions presents a serious and complex problem in clinical practice. Apart from standard surgical procedures, a variety of different sub-stances to prevent adhesions is available, but no universal method has been devel-oped so far. Clinical trials and animal studies on preventing the formation of postop-erative adhesions and substances that can have potential anti-adhesive properties have been carried out for over one hundred years. Considerable discrepancies and ambiguities regarding research results, as well as a great number of anti-adhesive substances to be tested, demonstrate the scope and the nature of the problem. Re-cently, new anti-adhesive fluids and pharmacological agents have been developed, which in preliminary observations seem to be almost perfect. The following paper reviews available literature on anti-adhesive methods and the authors’ limited experience