Emergency sclerotherapy versus vasoactive drugs for variceal bleeding in cirrhosis: a Cochrane meta-analysis

Emergency sclerotherapy is used as a first-line therapy for variceal bleeding in cirrhosis, although pharmacologic treatment stops bleeding in most patients. We performed a meta-analysis comparing emergency sclerotherapy with pharmacologic treatment.

MEDLINE (1968-2002), EMBASE (1986-2002), and the Cochrane Library (2002;4) were searched to retrieve randomized controlled trials comparing sclerotherapy with vasopressin (+/- nitroglycerin), terlipressin, somatostatin, or octreotide for variceal bleeding in cirrhosis. Outcome measures were failure to control bleeding, rebleeding, blood transfusions, adverse events, and mortality.

Fifteen trials were identified. Sclerotherapy was not superior to terlipressin, somatostatin, or octreotide for any outcome and to vasopressin for rebleeding, blood transfusions, death, and adverse events; it was superior to vasopressin for the control of bleeding in a single trial flawed by a potential detection bias. Sclerotherapy was associated with significantly more adverse events than somatostatin. In a predefined sensitivity analysis, combining all of the trials irrespective of the control treatment, risk differences (sclerotherapy minus control) and confidence intervals (CIs) were as follows: failure to control bleeding, -0.03 (-0.06 to 0.01); mortality, -0.035 (-0.07 to 0.008); adverse events, 0.08 (0.02 to 0.14). Mortality risk difference was -0.01 (-0.07 to 0.04) in good-quality trials and -0.08 (-0.14 to -0.02) in poor-quality trials.

Available evidence does not support emergency sclerotherapy as the first-line treatment of variceal bleeding in cirrhosis when compared with vasoactive drugs, which control bleeding in 83% of patients. Therefore, endoscopic therapy might be added only in pharmacologic treatment failures.