Degenerative spinal diseases and diabetes mellitus (DM) have increasingly become a social and economic burden. The effect of DM on spinal surgery complications reported by previous studies remains controversial.
We searched MEDLINE, Cochrane CENTRAL, ScienceDirect, EMBASE, and Google Scholar to identify studies reporting the relationship between DM and spinal surgery complications. Two independent reviewers performed independent data abstraction. The I 2 statistic was used to assess heterogeneity. A fixed-effects or random-effects model was used for the meta-analysis.
Twenty-four studies met the inclusion criteria. Surgical site infection and the incidence of deep venous thrombosis after spinal surgery were significantly higher in patients with than in patients without diabetes, and the length of hospital stay was significantly longer in patients with diabetes ( P<0.05). No significant differences were observed in the risk of reoperation, blood loss, and operation time between patients with and those without diabetes ( P.0.05).