“…The pooled average early SSI rate among 14,517 patients was 2.1% (median, 2.6%; range, 0.5%–16.7%) [11,13,20,22,25,32,78,82–84,86,142,147,156,164,167,170,171] compared with 0.8% (median, 0.9%; range, 0.1%–4.7%) for pooled average late SSI rate among 12,238 patients [11,13,54,83,167,171]. In terms of specific types of spine operations, 52 studies evaluated SSI rates among patients who underwent spinal fusion [9,10,14,15,21,24,27,30,33,42,43,46,52,56,58,62,63,68–70,72,75,76,92,103,105,107–109,111,113–115,119,120,123,125,128,133,139,141–144,146,150,151,157,161,162,164,173]. The pooled average SSI rate was calculated to be 1.6% (median, 2.8%; range, 0.2%–18.3%) based on 64 cohorts comprising a total of 212,639 patients.…”