The comparison of anesthesia effect of lung surgery through video-assisted thoracic surgery: A meta-analysis

The epidural anesthesia and general anesthesia are the most commonly used in lung surgery through video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS). Each of these methods has their advantages and disadvantages, so the aim of this meta-analysis is to identify which anesthesia is more conducive to lung surgery under VATS and rehabilitation of patients.

The Cochrane Library Database (Issue 12, 2013), PubMed (1966-2015), and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (1950-2015) were searched without language restrictions. Meta-analyses were conducted using Review Manager 5.2 software (The Cochrane Collaboration, Software Update, Oxford). We calculated odds ratio (OR) and its confidence interval (95% CI) to estimate the difference between epidural anesthesia and general anesthesia through finishing of the collected data.

Due to our search results, 7 studies were included in our study. Studies among them show that different contents of these articles are not all the same about research direction. Our findings suggested that epidural anesthesia had more advantages than general anesthesia for operative time (mean difference = - 23.85, 95% CI: - 29.67-- 18.03, P = 0.0001). More than that, epidural anesthesia showed a good surgical outcome on postoperative hospital stay (mean difference = - 0.43, 95% CI: - 0.85-- 0.01, P = 0.04) than general anesthesia. But we found that there were no different on numbers of people with complications (OR = 0.45, 95% CI: 0.23-0.89, P = 0.97) and headache occurrence (OR = 2.69, 95% CI: 0.62-11.70, P = 0.91) between epidural anesthesia and general anesthesia.

These results indicated that epidural anesthesia can save operating time and postoperative hospital stay time. But epidural anesthesia and general anesthesia have the same effect on complications.