Abstrakt
In this report we consider infant patients with facial lip and palate cleft issues and we investigate whether there is some relationship between the outcome of the first surgery and the need to perform the second surgery. The surgery always takes place in order to fully remove an indicated secretion from patient's ears, however, the secretion can either reappear after the first surgery, or it can be also developed later, while it was not present during the first surgery yet.
The results suggest, that patients who are most likely to undertake the second surgery are those who had the secretion already present in both their ears during the first surgery and, in addition, the medical test, used to indicate the secretion and taken after the first surgery, is again positive. The chance for the second surgery for such patients is roughly 37 times bigger than the chance of the second surgery for some other patient who had no secretion present during the first surgery and the medical test was negative (the 95 % confidence interval (9.6, 141.3), with the corresponding p-value < 0.0001).
On the other hand, patients with the smallest chance for the second surgery are those, who had no secretion present in their ears and some of the tests were negative (the estimated chance of the second surgery ranges between 15 - 20 %).