Clinical Effectiveness of Ertapenem Versus Piperacillin/ Tazobactam in Patients With Mild to Moderate Intraabdominal Infections: A Systematic Review and Metaanalysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Purpose: This study aimed to search for randomized clinical trials evaluating the clinical effectiveness of ertapenem compared to piperacillin/tazob actam in adult patients with mild to moderate intra-abdominal infections. Design: A literature review was performed in PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Cochrane databases in order to find articles published up to April 2019. Then, the pairwise method was used to compare the difference between the mean score of the clinical effectiveness of these two interventions before and after the intervention by the means of a non-direct method (the comparison of drugs with each other). Results: The analysis of 4 studies involving 767 patients in the ertapenem group and 728 patients in the piperacillin/ tazobactam group showed that ertapenem can be 3% more effective than piperacillin/tazobactam (Weighted mean differences = 3.02, confidence interval (0.79-6.84) although the difference was insignificant (I-squared = 0.0%, P = 0.98) Conclusions: In general, the findings demonstrated that there is no significant difference in the clinical effectiveness of ertapenem in comparison with piperacillin/tazobactam in adult patients with mild to moderate intra-abdominal infections.